PINOT GRIS

We had an experience this week that pointed up just how difficult is the art (or impossible the pretense, depending on your point of view) of wine and food pairing.

We started with a beautiful book, Perfect Pairings, by Master Sommelier Evan Goldstein and his mother, restaurant owner/chef Joyce Goldstein. Evan obviously understands the challenge, because he doesn’t recommend a wine varietal pairing; he recommends specific producers and regions. He even provides three selections at each of three different price points for some recipes.

Our plan was to conduct an experiment in “matching” and “contrasting” wine and food. The general idea here is that the primary characteristics of the wine you serve with a meal should either “match” the food flavors or “contrast” with them.  “Matching” just means that the “weight” of the wine should match the “weight” of the food. This is subjective based on the strength of flavors and the fullness of mouth-feel. The “contrast” concept is useful with rich foods because “rich on rich” would be just too much. In this case, we had chosen a Butternut Squash Risotto with Gorgonzola. The dish wants a wine with good acid and citric flavors to cut through the creamy gorgonzola and dense sweetness of the squash, and Evan recommended a range of Pinot Gris wines.

Pinot Gris (called Pinot Grigio in Italy), being a light wine—light in flavor, light in mouth-feel—can be successfully “matched” with food that is similarly light. We were serving, at this meal, oven-fried halibut seasoned with fresh cilantro. We had selected it specifically because it should pair well with Pinot Gris. This was our experiment: could we “match” and “contrast” the same wine in one meal?

The first problem we encountered was that we couldn’t find, available locally, any of Evan’s Pinot Gris selections. Pinot Gris is not made the same everywhere, and not every Pinot Gris suits the same food. As Evan Goldstein makes clear, Pinot Gris produced in Alsace (France) is a more full-bodied, full-flavored version than most.  All but one of the nine wines he recommends to pair with the risotto hale from Alsace. But the one Alsatian Pinot Gris we found, Sepp Mack Reserve 2004, a beautiful wine that we loved with bleu cheese, we found too smooth for the risotto. That is, it lacked the sharp acidity needed to offset rich creaminess. Bleu cheese has its own tanginess, but cream, gorgonzola squash, and even Arborio rice, need some sharpness from wine to keep from becoming cloying. Possibly, as a Reserve wine, this was more smooth from the beginning, but the few additional years of age—all the others reviewed here are from 2006 vintage—also would have softened the acids.

Next we tried MacMurray Pinot Grigio 2006 from Sonoma Coast in California, guessing correctly that the very cold climate of its home would produce a strong and restrained wine. It’s gorgeous, lean on the nose, soft and lemony in the mouth with intricate and layered fruit and mineral flavors. Unfortunately, it was too complex for the risotto.
 
Here’s another principle for pairing wine and food: If both the wine and the food are full of complex and interesting flavors, chances are they will clash at some point, or at least create so much busy-ness in your mouth that you can’t enjoy any of it fully—sort of like having the TV and the radio on at the same time; you can’t follow all the sounds from both.

On the other hand, full-flavored food requires full-flavored wine, so we set out to find another Pinot Gris that was big enough to stand up to the risotto AND delicate enough to pair elegantly with the fish. We tried a couple of blends, both from Italy: Masianco 2006, from the producer Masi is 25% Verduzzo; and Due Uve 2006 by Bertani is 50% Sauvignon Blanc. In both cases, the Pinot Grigio flavor disappeared under the stronger second grape. The Masianco was interesting and refreshing, but not suited to this meal; the Due Uve tasted like watered down Sauvignon Blanc.

We were losing heart, but tried two more Italians: Colterenzio 2006 from the Alto Adige, where high elevations provide cold nights; and Marco Scolaris 2006 from Collio, east of Alto Adige, in the far northeast of Italy. We liked both wines enormously. The Colterenzio had mineral and pineapple on the nose and felt clean and soft in the mouth. Melon flavors rounded out the citrus—unfortunately too much for our rich dish; we wanted a bit more acid.

The Marco Scolaris was perfect for our dinner. It had enough complexity to be interesting with the simple fish, and enough fruity acid to cut clean through the cream and gorgonzola in the risotto. There was a bit of anise in the nose, and we even paired this successfully with fennel salad. Was this the best wine in the lot? Yes, and No. It was the best wine for our purposes in this instance. Others of the wines were equally interesting, or more elegant, or fuller in flavor or mouth-feel. The answer to the question, “What’s the best wine?” is almost always, “It depends.”

I do not tell this story to discourage, but rather to encourage you to experiment, to pay attention—with your own tastes—to what it is that you like or don’t like about how things taste together. Unless you try to pair a very strong, astringent wine with delicately flavored and textured food, you will probably never have a bad experience. The point here is that, no matter how knowledgeable and sophisticated the writer of advice may be, there are always factors that can’t be taken into account. You will just have to Try Things Out—and isn’t Discovery what makes all this wine stuff so much fun, anyway?