Sometime in late summer, one of my colleagues at Carleton University asked if I would give a wine course to 12 women, most of them also from Carleton. I weighed the request for about one second.
In my experience, women are generally better tasters than men, and they're certainly less inhibited in offering thoughts and less concerned about getting things wrong. Why wouldn't I do this?
So, during October we all met for four sessions of tasting and talking. I took them through the techniques of tasting and the ways of thinking about and describing wine, and in the first three sessions we tasted a wide range of Old World and Canadian wines.
These women fulfilled my expectations. They had no hesitation offering opinions and assessments of the wines we tasted and they quickly caught on to the techniques of tasting. I'd have to give them, collectively, a solid B at least. The only part of tasting where they scored a less-than-stellar grade was in Spitting 101 -- alas, some of those spit-cups were as empty at the end of the tasting as at the beginning.
The last of our sessions was supposed to be devoted to New World wines, but there was a consensus that they really wanted to discuss wine and food pairing. So we decided that I would provide the wine and they would bring the food to that session.
What we ended up with was a table of assorted digital dishes (a.k.a. finger food). These included shrimp with seafood sauce, smoked trout and salmon, various salamis (including a spicy Calabrese), pate, chicken satay with ginger and garlic, a variety of cheeses including goat, sheep (Crotonese), cheddar, gorgonzola, and dark chocolate.
In short, we ended up with a table of the sort of dishes you might find at a party in the festive season that's about to hit us. I give the food selection an A.
The question was (and is): What sorts of wine might you pair with this range of flavours and textures? Do you have to sip a different wine with each dish (a pretty impractical demand), or are there one or two wines that might handle them all?
We started with what could have been a straightforward match, a Babich Sauvignon Blanc (from New Zealand) with the shrimp. I suggested not dipping the shrimp into the spicy sauce, but that was probably a mistake. By themselves, the shrimp seemed bland to the point of being flavourless and, when paired with the Sauvignon Blanc, the wine simply overwhelmed them. A squeeze of lemon on the shrimp helped a bit, but not much. How would I grade this pairing? I'd give it a C-.
The reality was that these shrimp were nothing more than a platform for the sauce. It's pointless to pair a wine with something that has no flavour when the whole purpose of wine and food pairing is to find relationships that enhance both the food and the wine.
The Sauvignon Blanc was a hit with the goat cheese, though. Sauvignon and goat cheese is one of those classic matches -- and it really does work as the pungency of the wine nicely echoed the pungency of the cheese. We gave this an A.
Not wanting to give up on the shrimp, I suggested trying the Pinot Noir (from EastDell in Niagara). This is a light Pinot with quite delicate fruit flavours, and several women thought it was good with the shrimp. Elaine Rouleau and Sheryl Hamilton thought it was a much better match than the Sauvignon Blanc.
I tended to agree. It brought out some sweetness in the shrimp, rather as Pinot Noir does with fresh lobster -- a great match I discovered when I was in Nova Scotia a couple of years ago. The shrimp-Pinot pairing sounded like a B+ or an A- from them. For me it was a B-.
The Pinot Noir also went quite well with the pate. Here the delicate flavours of the wine complemented the pate and the Pinot's relatively high acidity cut through the fat in the food. A solid B for this coupling.
For the chicken satay we tried a Franschhoek Cellar Chenin Blanc from South Africa. I thought the fruitiness in the wine might work well with the spiciness (garlic, ginger) in the chicken, but the pairing got a general thumbs-down, like a D.
At this point, the orderly tasting and pairing was starting to break down a bit and some participants began to improvise their own pairings, but most of us moved on to something with a lot more flavour -- the salamis -- which we tried with a variety of wines, including a Mondavi Chardonnay from California and Hardys "Stamp Series" Cabernet-Merlot blend from Australia.
A bit more success, here. Heather Pyman liked the spicy Calabrese with the Cabernet-Merlot, perhaps because the wine itself was very spicy. The tone of her comments make me think A-.
More successful matches came with the cheeses. There's a general tendency to want to match cheeses with red wine but I find that in many cases, especially with milder flavoured cheeses like Brie and Camembert, white wines do better.
That seemed to be the case with the young cheddar, which I suggested trying with the Chardonnay. Ms. Hamilton observed that "the sweetness of the Chardonnay talks to the cheese." It got her a chorus of jeers from the others for "snob-talk."
I think a more conventional pairing would have been a fairly substantial red, like a Cabernet Sauvignon, but that would have dominated this cheese. An aged cheddar with much more flavour and bite would have been better with a red, and that was the case with the Crotonese -- a sheep cheese with a fairly dry and sharp texture.
We tried it first with the Pinot Noir but that didn't get much support. "No, that's no good," Eileen Saunders cried (meaning it was an F, maybe). "Quick! Pass the Cab-Merlot!"
It did pair well with the Cabernet-Merlot (grade: B+) but not quite as well with Casillero del Diablo Carmenere from Chile. The Carmenere is fruitier and has less acidity than the Cabernet-Merlot, and with the cheese it tended to be just too much of a mouthful. Definitely a C- together.
We ended with a couple of sweet wines. The first was a Lailey Vidal icewine, which we tried with the blue cheese. Satisfied sounds all round at this classic pairing. The sweetness and acidity in icewine love saltiness (think of seared foie gras), and the briny flavours of the cheese made for a seamless match. Definitely a first-class effort.
Finally, I poured a Lammershoek Late Bottled Vintage Zinfandel from South Africa. This is made in a Port style and we tasted it with dark chocolate. Again, a very good pairing worthy of an A-.
Lessons learned from this session?
It's generally difficult to find one or two wines that pair successfully with such a variety of dishes, but the most successful were wines that were nicely balanced and without too much of anything. The Pinot Noir did well, as did the Chardonnay, although these women liked the Cabernet-Merlot pairings more than I did. Overall, in fact, they preferred the red wine matches more often than I did.
If you're choosing, say, a red and a white for your upcoming parties, go for styles that offer good fruit and balance without too much fruitiness, acidity or tannins. Even if they don't pair perfectly with all your dishes, they're not likely to clash with many of them.
Wines This Week