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Wine and Food No-Nos
By David Rosengarten
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No.
All right, all right. For some people, it's not easy to just say no. They've grown up hearing all about the dreaded foods that don't work with wine, and wouldn't be caught dead ordering a glass of wine with salad, with artichokes, with soup. Their fear is a blend of imagined disaster on a gastronomic level ("Yuk! That offends my palate!"), and imagined disaster on a social level ("How can I ever join the club after they've seen me order Beaujolais with a salad?")
You must understand two things about all these fusty rules:
1) It is impossible for general rules to make any sense in the complicated business of food-and-wine matching--especially because all of the "rules" you've heard were formulated 150 years ago, when wine was incredibly different; and
2) The "rules" developed, for the most part, around very high-caliber wines, and were meant to "protect" those wines from the wrong foods.
So, I say, if you are drinking 1870 Chateau Margaux at the Garrick Club in London as the nineteenth century winds down...don't order the salad! But if you're used to drinking something less than Chateau Margaux, and if you're sitting in a restaurant today--forget about it! The right wine will definitely go with the right salad.
Let's explore that a little. The reason we're supposed to keep our leafy greens from our grapy drinks is in the dressing: the acid of a vinaigrette will most definitely change the perceived character of a wine. Something acidic makes wine taste sweeter--and if you're drinking a great wine, balanced on the head of a pin, why would you want to alter your perception of it? You are paying, in part, to apprehend a great wine's exquisite harmony.
But what if you're drinking rotgut (which comes closer to describing what I usually drink than "Chateau Margaux" does)? If the wine is thin and acid to begin with, with no fancy "balance" that you wish to preserve, the miracle is that an acidic dressing will make your wine taste sweeter, richer, fuller, fruitier, better! With that hypothetical wine, you shouldn't avoid salad with vinaigrette--you should go out of your way to serve it. I love salad with unimpressive Beaujolais--exactly what you'll find at bistro after bistro in the Beaujolais region.
Similar issues attend the subject of wine with artichokes: anything you taste, be it wine, water or bagels, will taste sweeter after you've tasted an artichoke. The reason here is not acid in the food, but a natural substance called cynarin. Once again, don't turn your 8-year-old Corton-Charlemagne into Diet Pepsi by drinking it with an artichoke. However, if you grab a wine that is so determinedly dry it's unappealing to most people, and serve it with an artichoke gratin, you have probably improved the pleasure-giving ability of that wine. Some of the dry German wines (labeled "Trocken") can be too dry for some tasters; then it's artichoke time. In the US, one of my favorite matches with artichokes is Proven? ros?this wine can taste delightfully fruity in the south of France, but when it gets sent here much of the fruit seems to dissipate over the ocean, and the wines can become austere. Artichokes, garlic, tomatoes, herbs, olive oil--and newly un-austere Proven? ros?Happiness!
Soup and wine present a different issue: texture. The classic thinking is that wine (a thin liquid) with soup (a thin liquid) is texturally redundant. But, to my mind, this would only be a problem if you're sipping consomm?and even then there are ways around it (like serving a richer, fortified wine with the thin soup, or serving something bubbly, like Champagne, with it.) But the field's much more open than that, these days--because hardly anyone serves consomm?nymore! Lots of rich soups, crammed with goodies, have come into our lives from other ethnic traditions and creative chefs are constantly coming up with new soups, in which, for example, a main course portion of grilled halibut may "swim" in a broth. Don't be scared by the broth! Just take a good look at what's in the broth, and go about wine-matching as if this thing was not a soup at all. If I'm eating a Vietnamese pho, and feel like a glass of wine, I'm thinking about what to drink with boiled beef, noodles and herbs. If I come up with a simple Australian Shiraz, should I suffer public humiliation? I think not.
There are foods that I do find difficult to match with wine, but, ironically, they are sometimes the ones that the "rules" treat as easy matches. Wine with cheese? A nightmare! But that's another subject. For now, please don't let anyone cow you into thinking that certain foods are off-limits to wine. The realm of delicious matches is only limited by your imagination.
The Real-World Wine Guide Table of Contents
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