Teaching wine and food matching (entailing diversity of taste)
From the chapter: Culinary matters
I think every sommelier starts off in the business full of ideas and ideals, which quickly come crashing down once you get on a restaurant floor and start working with real customers—or guests, as we say (although they still pay for the privilege, which technically makes them customers).
Take wine and food matching. I never liked the word “pairing,” which seems to be the common parlance, because that always suggests that there is one “best” wine for every dish, and vice versa; and one of the things a new sommelier learns from Day 1 is that such a thing does not exist. Customers come in way too many shapes and sizes to be locked into one-size-fits-all wine/food combinations. The word “matching,” on the other hand, suggests the possibilities of a multiplicity of possibilities—which is the reality.
People’s tastes vary—but you knew that. Many people love ice cream, and many people can’t stomach it. Tons of people are crazy for hamburgers—fatty meat, sweet/sharp ketchup, smelly onions, white bread and all—while tons of people find the classic American sandwich absolutely repulsive.
So why do we assume that since a light, sharply dry white wine makes a great match for raw oysters, all people should enjoy Sancerre, or something similar such as Muscadet or Picpoul de Pinet, with oysters? If you know people, you know that there are probably enough of them out there who might prefer the opposite—a soft, fruity white, or even a light, bitter red wine—and ignoring that reality just makes you that much less a sommelier, presuming you are in it to enhance guest experiences.
All during the 13 years I worked for Roy Yamaguchi’s eponymous family of Roy’s restaurants, I utilized one of his seminal East/West style dishes for wine and food “101” staff training: Hawaiian tuna seared raw on a flat grill with Cajun spices, served with two sauces—a stinging soy mustard and a fairly luscious, buttery beurre blanc—and garnished with pickled cucumber, ginger, peppery spice sprouts, and toasted sesame seeds. All of this added up to an avalanche of every sensation in the book—sweet, sour, spicy, bitter, salty, umami, hot, cold, soft, crunchy, fat and thin—which is what, undoubtedly, made this dish a universal favorite.
We conducted our wine/food classes in logical fashion, tasting four, sometimes five wines with each dish. That a blackened tuna in soy mustard butter sauce tastes great with wine in general is no surprise. What was always surprising for first-timers on the staffs was finding out how much they’d like more than one wine with a single dish. You would think, for instance, that a typically fat, fruity, oaky California Chardonnay would not make a good match for a spice tinged dish; but the fact is, there is enough fattiness in a slice of tuna as well as in a beurre blanc-laced sauce to prompt enough people to say they prefer a California Chardonnay with a dish such as Yamaguchi's blackened tuna.
Dry sparkling wines were also a recurring favorite—bubbles and the acidity of early picked grapes, after all, freshen a palate after bites of the spicy red fleshed fish—although just as often, shows of hands went up for red wines such as a good Pinot Noir. When earthy Cajun spices interact with soy, mustard, spice sprouts and toasty sesame seeds, umami sensations run rampant in the mouth; and few wines handle umami components as well as standard issue Pinot Noir.
Then there’s dry or off-dry Rieslings; dry yet fruit and mineral scented rosés; softer, spice nuanced Syrahs or Zinfandels; wiry, tart Sauvignon Blancs and other light, dry whites. You get the picture: When a multifaceted dish such as Yamaguchi’s tuna is tasted with multiple wines, invariably someone will find a favorable match in one wine or another, no matter how different. It always comes down to connecting sensations of similarity or contrasts. It’s just that the more sensations in a dish⏤typical of high end restaurant cooking today⏤the higher the percentage that multiple wine types will compliment them.
Which again, should come as no surprise, except for the fact that we tend to forget that staffs come with the same enormously varied tastes as the people sitting in our dining rooms. You learn as much from staff as they learn from you. Besides an understanding of how wines and foods match, this lesson also became the point of our tasting exercise: Assume nothing about your guests; at least not until you’ve actually engaged them, and do as much listening as talking. You can point your guests in a direction that they are most likely to find appealing only after you've gotten some kind of feel for their preferences. It's not easy, of course, doing this within the space of a few seconds while standing at a table, but I've seen enough talented waiters to know it can be done.
You needn't, however, rely entirely on the talent of your waiters. It is also possible to take advantage of the natural diversity of guest tastes by building this into your wine program. If you do glass suggestions on your food menus, for instance, you can recommend a diversity of wines —something red, white or pink, something dry or sweet, something earthy or fruit driven, and so forth. Everyone who has tried the “flight” approach to suggesting wines with dishes says the same thing: It’s amazing how many people want to try all the wines suggested, and there’s nothing like the fun of watching them discover how multiple wines can go with one dish, each for different reasons.
Even long established wineries—notorious for falling into the rut of “house styles”—are catching on. A few years ago (in 2015) I was at one nationally distributed California winery’s tasting room, trying two of their Chardonnays. One was made in a soft, fruity, buttery (“Rombauer,” if you will) style, and the other in a lighter, pointedly tart, leaner, dryer style. I asked the tasting room manager which of the two was selling the best, and she said “both.” Older generations (especially those in the Boomer age group) were still buying up the fruity Chardonnay, and younger crowds (at that time, Millennials) were going for the sharper style—with of course, the usual crossovers (Millennials with Boomer-like taste and vice versa).
Consumer tastes, that is to say, have been moving further and further away from one-size-fits-all than ever before. Which is why, as a sommelier, you will always need to follow one of those cardinal rules of smart restaurant service: Always expect the unexpected, and prepare to be surprised. Which you do by having a full range of wines in terms of sensory qualities (it is not necessary to stock up on every wine in the world to accomplish this) ready to go, no matter who walks in.
Simply put, you don't want your wine program to appeal to just one set of customers, even if it's a majority taste. You want to sell to all of them, because that’s what makes business sense.