WB food and wine pairing discussions that perplex me

That’s partly true. Though I still scratch my head at the insistence that you can’t have any normal wine with Korean BBQ, for example.

Here’s a thread where someone asks for recommendations of what to pair with fish. Not any specific fish, but fish in general. And look at the responses (just pulling off page two of the thread): red blends from Crete, Montepulciano, Frappato, Poulsard, Lagrein, Refrosco, Pinot Meuneir, Rossesse, Bardolino, Schiava, Bourgeuil, Vernatsch. Zero mentions of Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc.

I think there is some significant gap between what people say on WB food pairing threads and what they actually do. There has to be. We WBers drink a hundred times more chardonnay with our fish than all those varieties I just listed put together, but nobody dares mention the C word in a food pairing thread about fish.

And that’s fine, this isn’t any huge deal, but that’s probably the answer as to why those discussions make so little sense to me.

That sums it up perfectly.

Except at the extremes, I don’t worry a bit about wine pairings. For the most part I think the mania over “pairings” is a product of too many people trying to make a living serving and writing about wines. I am pretty sure the Piemontese don’t fret too much about whether to have a sauv blanc or gamay with a particular dish. The open what they have. In most instances it will work just fine.

We don’t drink during the week very much. We open a bottle while dinner is cooking, maybe have a short taste then, drink what’s left over dinner and thereafter. On rare occasions, we will open a second bottle and have a glass each, or a 375.

I have enough things to worry about; fretting over wine pairings would be too much like work

and, for some folks, “fretting over” wine pairings is actually lots of fun!

when I have the time, I’ll do a search of my TNs on Cellartracker for the words pair, -ing,-ed, and -s to see if I can get a sense of my wine-food pairing habits (really, to see if my habits differ from what I think they are). Only downside to that is I don’t always comment on the food pairing in my TN.

“Fretting” over wine pairings sounds to me like you think there’s a wrong answer. I like to contemplate wine pairings, and I enjoy the heck out of it when I find a combination that really works perfectly, but I almost never find a combination I truly don’t enjoy. When I do, that’s almost always because I just flat don’t enjoy either the food or the wine (or both) on their own.

I also find a lot of the exotic pairing advice posted here to be humorous, not because I think those pairings won’t work, but because I wonder how many folks, even on this board, can just reach into their holdings and pull out a Poulsard or Rossesse or some of the other obscure choices on demand. It seems to me that if you are giving advice, you want to at least have the hope that someone can actually act on it. If you’re going to offer an obscure suggestion, at least offer up a somewhat more mainstream alternative that someone is likely have on hand.

For me, personally, we open mainstream varietals/blends about 98% of the time. On regular weekdays, my wife usually chooses the wine from the “guilt free” shelf I have set up for her, because she likes having a glass before dinner (or while cooking, if she’s the one in the kitchen that day). I almost always go with what she picks, especially since we very rarely finish even one whole bottle in an evening. She has less overall wine knowledge than I do, but she does have an excellent palate and I tend to like what I buy, so she very rarely chooses something I just don’t feel like having. We both have wine with dinner, then I’ll typically have some afterwards, as well. I’d say about half of what we actually drink on a weeknight is actively paired with food, which on weeknights tends to be very pedestrian. On weekends or special occasions, we tend to take a longer time savoring better food that makes for more interesting pairing with good wine.

I think the bite-sip business is a red herring - most flavors and textures tend to linger on the nose and palate, and pairings work fine (or not) on that basis. If you are sitting down at the meal table while you drink your wine, that generally counts as “paired” in my book.

I rarely drink whilst cooking - perhaps the only time I do this consistently is when we have friends over and as it’s an open plan kitchen/diner I’ll drink at the same time as keeping the food ticking over and chipping into the conversation.

With food on an ordinary night? probably 10-15cl and that’s probably about half of what I’d drink in an evening. OK if the wine is good we’ll get close to finishing the bottle between us. If it’s great we might just finish the bottle - perhaps more likely on a Friday or Saturday, but still rare.

We aren’t averse to choosing the wine we want, rather than a wine that will match, and just waiting until the food is completed to drink the wine.

My wife and I do have wine with dinner almost every night. I pour the wine a minute or so before she serves dinner. When dinner is over, we usually have two or three sips of wine left. So yes, we take a bite, take a sip, repeat. I do a broad pairing (that is, nothing heavy with a light meal, nothing light with a heavy meal), but that’s it.

I almost never take a 3rd sip of a wine without first correcting my palate with food or at least a water biscuit. I’m drinking what you would call AFWE and not cocktail wines though.

Our meals last at least an hour, generally more sitting around at the table, finishing the bottle, the bread, etc.

No more than two bites without a sip.

We drink widely, and largely the table wines popular around the world. Bourgogne, Beaujolais, Barbera, Dolcetto, Riesling, Muscadet, Soave, etc etc.

One factor may be the paucity of red bottlings of Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. See the thread’s title again. And that thread specifically excludes Pinot Noir. And, in my book at least, rare is the fish which cries out for Cabernet/Bordeaux/Malbec/Shiraz; your palate my vary (and those choices may all have been exhausted on page one, being, you know, the “normal” varieties.)

I think there is some significant gap between what people say on WB food pairing threads and what they actually do. There has to be. We WBers drink a hundred times more chardonnay with our fish than all those varieties I just listed put together, but nobody dares mention the C word in a food pairing thread about fish.

I’m not all WBers, but I surely don’t. I drink some wines made from Chardonnay with fish (probably more Chablis than anything else), some Sancerre, but also Riesling, Albarino, Verdicchio, Vermentino, Muscadet (Melon de Bourgogne), Rioja (Viura), Fino sherry, Greco, Chenin, and the list goes on for quite a while.

I also drink probably 75% of my wine with food, alternating sips and bites, and find good pairing to make an enormous difference. e.g. recently fried some fish filets with a crushed cornflake crust and topped with a homemade Mexican salsa verde (hello Rick Bayless) with a little lime and cilantro. Thought that might work with a Muller-Thurgau, and yowza, for once I was completely right - the lime zest notes in that light-bodied wine went gangbusters with that dish, really elevating both the solids and liquids. The other half bottle the next day was still in good shape but coexisted a bit awkwardly with the pasta with parsnips, the typical “it doesn’t completely suck, but the one adds absolutely nothing to the other, and I really kinda need to pause between bite and sip to not notice a bit of dissonance.”

It’s wonderful that the board accommodates winos across the entire spectrum. I’ll admit, however, to finding it a bit odd that you find it a bit odd that on a board for rabidly enthusiastic wine geeks, people would express significant enthusiasm for varieties outside the top three or four, and for putting thought into pairing with food. I mean, wouldn’t it be far weirder if all suggestions were only for the very middle of the beaten track? On beerbersekers, do they wax enthusiastic about the half dozen biggest lager and pilsner labels most of the time?

For what it is worth, and I am probably way out of the middle, I drink so little Chard, Cab, Merlot, Zin that it borders on non-exsistent. And most of my wine is consumed with food. I do drink some Pinot Noir but it is usually from Burgundy or a few select producers in Cali/Oregon. My diet is heavily mediterranean and so are the wines that go with it.

Chris, in your honor I just recommended a Sauvignon Blanc to a customer looking for a pairing with an Italian fish stew. It was from Friuli.

I love varieties outside the main ones. I probably have a disproportionate fondness for oddball varieties when I can find them. I hosted a tasting for some WBers a year ago, and I served Plavac Mali, Obadeh/Merwah, Carignan, Nerello Mascalese, Graciano and Tannat, blind. So we’re birds of a feather. [Your beer example lost me a bit, because you switched from types to labels – I didn’t ask why nobody recommends BV or Mondavi in food pairing threads.]

But what always confounded me is that someone asks “what wines would go with food X,” and the answers always exclude the wines that are 90+% of what gets drunk by WBers, plus a chorus of people saying wine won’t go with most foods and you should drink beer. Cab, merlot, pinot, syrah, zin, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc are good answers to many of those questions, and wine overall can go with almost any food, but there seems to be some reluctance to say so on Wine Berserkers, of all places.

And I stand corrected on that thread about the fish, that is my mistake.

Thanks Chuck and everyone for indulging me in probing, perhaps a bit too insistently here, the WB orthodoxy in wine pairing threads.

Chris,

I suspect the answer is simple. Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay and their typical red counterparts are typical. I doubt anyone who comes here to solicit pairing advice hasn’t already contemplated them as potential pairings, so many of us look at other varieties to help locate things that are new and different and share them with others.

I’m the guy who always says Champagne because I love it so much, but can’t drink it nearly as often as I’d like ($$$). So, you know, vicarious living.

And cheers to 10-minute eating. 2.5 yo and 11 month old = chew twice if lucky and on to the next bite.

For what it’s worth, I had a cabernet with roast beef tonight. I thought it worked just fine, though I felt a twinge of guilt that I hadn’t opened a saperavi, plavac mali, xinomavro, or something else that would have been infinitely more appropriate :wink:

There’s no doubt something to your central point/question here. A few more thoughts:

  • I definitely think Jim Coley’s response [welldone.gif] is on target: in a forum where people, including you and me, who dig exploring the far corners of the wine world congregate, many of us find it inherently more rewarding to learn and teach the mildly-to-mind-blowingly esoteric. Wouldn’t you find it more interesting to hear, “that dish and Plavic Mali (whatever the hell that is, and wherever it’s grown!) (actually, substitute a variety you’re not already intimate with) are, like, separated at birth, and you wouldn’t believe how grateful they are to be reunited!” vs. “oh, just drink a cab with it” from every respondent.

  • Do those varieties really account for > 90% of Berserker consumption?

  • Is it possible there’s some correlation between exploring wines made from some of those zany grapes (like, oh, Sangiovese or the Rhone whites) vs. (mostly) just cab, pinot, chard, etc. and one’s passion for exploring food & wine pairing? At the very simplest level, maybe the guy who drinks cab 9 days out of 10 by statistical necessity therefore drinks it with everything, and doesn’t think much about the whole pairing issue.

  • Is it possible there’s some correlation between fondness for old vs. new world wines and drinking more wine vs. outside meals? (Oh I know, even making a distinction is “old world” in a bad way in some quarters.) To me, as a gross generalization, OW wines tend to be more “balanced for the table,” i.e. they gain more from food (or if you prefer, are crappier without food - though I think quite often they’re also better with food, but hey, maybe I should leave that deadhorse alone). I note that, at least in this thread, you seem to mostly use the new-world-centric terminology in naming the grape variety as the wine’s primary type classification, though the random Beaujolais and Bourgueil seem to have slipped in.

C, who did pretty well this evening with the second half of last night’s Berseker Day Alsatian Riesling (Beck-Hartweg) and baked fish filets with tomato-habanero salsa . [cheers.gif] Not that every meal here is fish + Mexican salsa + aromatic white.

Except for aperitifs (usually Champagne) and postprandials (usually Madeira) I don’t drink wine without a meal unless at a tasting.

I pay attention to food and wine pairings in the sense that I tend to drink wine from the same region as the origin of the main dish. When traveling, which we do frequently, we most often drink wine from the nearby area. In those places, food and wine were developed together over time. Often for the reason that they taste good together.

Chris,

  1. These threads aren’t ever started by someone who is attempting to pair with something straightforward. Cabernet, Chardonnay, etc. NEVER pair well with foods that aren’t particularly wine friendly. The wines that you view as so esoteric (rosé, Champagne, Beaujolais, Dolcetto, etc.) are infinitely more food friendly than the wines that you seem to be extolling as mainstream wines. Hence, the tendency for the recommendations to come from that list.

  2. We always pair our wine with the meal. This week’s wines, so far- Alsatian Riesling, Champagne, Loire Chenin Blanc, Cru Beaujolais, CdP- every single bottle chosen based on how it would pair with what we were cooking. The wines that you presume fall in the category of wines that are consumed by the majority of the time by Berserkers on a regular basis are rarely seen on our dinner table & occupy a very small portion of our cellar.

  3. I think the real crux of the argument is that some people drink wine like cocktails, some view wine as an integral part of the meal. That likely explains the difference in how those pairing threads are viewed.

I’m drinking PN with red sauce pasta tomorrow night. How am I doin’? :wink:

Did that yesterday with a '97 Drouhin CSD.

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