More Bang for Your Chuck!

As Memorial Day approaches, all over America one can feel cravings mount for a big, fat, juicy burger soon to be followed by the sound of grills igniting.  For wine lovers, this presents the delightful challenge of finding just the right bottle: humble in price, rich in flavor.  Here are three selections under $15.00, accompanied by a recipe for bacon

cheddar burgers.  The wines will be at their best with thirty minutes to an hour’s decanting.

2008 Altovinum Evodia Old Vines Garnacha, $8.49. 100% Garnacha from the Calatayud region of Spain.  Concentrated, big, spicy wine with a long finish.  Flavors of blueberry, blackberry, licorice and pepper predominate.  Smooth tannins, with lively acidity.

2008 Bogle Vineyards Old Vines Zinfandel, $12.00.  100% Zinfandel from California’s Amador and Lodi counties.  Full-bodied, slightly jammy. Notes of cinnamon, clove, blackberry and plum.  Mid-palate chocolate.  Great all around BBQ wine.

2006 Cantele Salice Salentino Riserva DOC, $10.99.  85% Negroamaro, 15% Malvasia Nera.  The Cantele family is leading the way in Puglia, creating wines that are winning acclaim all over Italy.  Salice is a ruby-colored, full-bodied, complex wine, redolent of smoke, bacon and red fruits.  Firm tannins and good acidity.

Bacon Cheddar Burgers

Serves 4  

2 pounds ground chuck

4 slices bacon, chopped

3/4 cup finely chopped onion

3 cloves minced garlic

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

4 slices cheddar cheese

Saute bacon over medium heat until crispy.  Add onions to pan and cook until soft.  

When mixture has cooled, add it to the meat with next four ingredients.  

Form meat into four patties and grill on one side.  Flip and top with cheddar.  Cook to preferred doneness.  Serve with your favorite condiments.

"Wine gives great pleasure, and every pleasure is of itself a good."                  

(Samuel Johnson, 1778)

Let's keep in mind, the main purpose of seeking a great food and wine match is to increase sensual pleasure. Who among us hasn't had the peak experience of a perfect meal, where the liason of wine and food held our senses captive throughout, and left us fully satiated body and soul? For the less experienced wine enthusiasts among us, however, the pressure to replicate this type of sustained thrall can serve to raise performance anxiety!

This article will address why wine pairing is now more complicated, if potentially more rewarding, than ever before and provide some tips for overcoming the obstacles to pairing success, so you can hit your gustatory G spot more often. Included are taste experiments you can do in your own dining room, best carried out among encouraging friends. As your knowledge and experience grow, creating your menu will become more a state of anticipatory fantasy of the satisfaction to come vs an occasion to retreat with a headache.

Complications to food and wine matching:

COST: The education required to become a masterful pairer can be prohibitive. When a student asked Los Angeles wine educator, Martin Weiner (vintagewineenterprises.com), how he could become a wine expert, Mr. Weiner said, "You have to drink a lot of wine and remember what you drink!" To broaden and deepen your knowledge requires re-tasting the same and similar wines and playing with different food combinations as you go. Unless you're in the business, or have a lot of spare cash, how likely are you to be able to afford to sample multiple vintages of Chateau Cos d'Estournel going back to 1985 alongside various dishes, perhaps more than once?

Tip #1: Create in-home tastings by forming a group with other budding winos to defray costs. Agree on a format to use for your events.

Will you taste one varietal from many geographic locations, study the varietals of a particular area in depth, create a dish or menu and work on adjusting the pairings until you get them just right? Make sure to take notes on your findings. Hiring a wine consultant just to get you started on your explorations can be helpful. Sounds like fun. Your place or mine?

Tip #2. Spring for a local wine dinner once in awhile. Although not inexpensive, they are much more affordable than compiling the ingredients on your own. Aside from learning what goes with what, an advantage of attending them is that you get a feel for how menus evolve for maximum impact. They often begin with light bodied wines alongside subtly flavored foods, progressing to bolder, richer wines with robust foods at the dinner's end. Wally's Wines and Spirits (wallywine.com) and The Wine House (winehouse.com) have frequent winemaker and wine pairing dinners that will leave you tingling. Your favorite restaurants may host them as well.

Tip #3. Frequent restaurants and wine bars that allow you to order small tastes of wine (2 oz.or so), not only whole glasses.

Thus you can pair a different wine with each course of your meal, while sticking to some semblance of a budget. Local gems include:

AOC, Enoteca Drago and Upstairs 2.

EVERYBODY HAS AN OPINION: While wine experts are helpful to consult, they sometimes range widely on their rankings and food recommendations, adding more confusion than clarity. They can have very fixed opinions about what to drink with what you're eating, but their "expert" palate is not necessarily your palate.

I will never forget the woeful feeling I had after opening a bottle of Brunello meant to go with my Christmas roast beef. It had been ranked 100 points and had an alluring write-up. I have renamed it "Prunello", because it was completely uni-dimensional and tasted strongly of prune juice! It had very little acidity and was absolutely flabby next to the meat. Poor cow died in vain. I learned then never to open an untested wine for an important meal.

Tip #1: Learn more about your own palate. Write down the names of the wines you like to drink, and what you enjoyed eating with them. Research their tasting notes online. Wine-searcher.com is a great site for this. Go to winemakers' websites.

Find out as much as you can about your favorites: how their flavors are described, what kind of barrels they're aged in, which grapes are combined to make them, what pairings are recommended, where they're grown, etc. Armed with more knowledge about your tastes, look to wine experts who like the same kind of wine you do for advice, and spare yourself some false starts.

Tip #2: Form a close, personal relationship with your neighborhood wine merchant. By following tip #1, you've developed enough savvy about what thrills you to articulate it to someone who can help you find it. People in the wine business are quite generous with their knowledge, and often great cooks. The more serious among them are seduced by the opportunity to take an initiate under wing. Start by getting recommendations for wines to go with weekday dinners. If these work out, move up to seeking advice on special occasion meals.

YOU ARE NOT A SOMMELIER: With celebrity chefs gaining the status of rock stars, we have become obsessed with things gastronomic like never before. Foodies put demands on themselves to assimilate all this culinary data and perform flawlessly.

But you were not educated to be a sommelier, who devotes his/her entire career to creating perfect pairings. Professionals are able to do this, because they've spent years: tasting, analyzing and keeping notes on wines and the foods that best match them, for every large, small and emerging wine growing area in the world. They go through repeated vertical, horizontal, and blind tastings (see below) and wine dinners that are simply less accessible to the general public.

Tip #1. Make a curriculum for your group that mimics aspects of sommelier training. For example, hold a blind tasting event.

Each group member brings a wine concealed in a paper bag, which is secretly poured into a blackened glass. After tasting, you guess what it is. It can be organized so that you either: 1) plan to feature one grape cultivated in different growing regions, 2) taste the same varietal from several producers in a given area, or 3) have a free for all where people just bring what they feel like bringing. Make sure everyone has a wine scoring sheet. You can assign points to the wines, make notes about their flavor characteristics and brainstorm about recipes that would pair well.

Tip #2. Move on to vertical and horizontal tasting. For vertical tastings, multiple vintages of one wine from the same vineyard are tasted and compared. This shows how the wine changes in expression from year to year. For horizontal tastings, all the wines are from different wineries in a specific area, but the same vintage. This highlights individual winemaker's styles.

SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: You cannot DRINK all the wine you TASTE at wine events! That much wine is not good for your health.

You must learn to moderate and to SPIT after you taste. Yup, spit in public. All wine pros do it. That's why there are strategically placed little buckets all around the table at these things.

GLOBALIZATION In the past several decades, the international cultivation and availability of wines and food stuffs we couldn't get prior, has exploded. Today our supermarket wine aisles confront us with the fortunate quandary of selections from all over the world, that go equally well with whatever regional or ethnic cuisine we've settled on for dinner. To make things more confusing, many popular dishes come from areas where there is either no, or only a recent history of wine making, hence no culturally imbedded paring experience to guide us.

The tendency toward fusion compounds things even more... some complex flavors are harder to match.

By way of contrast, imagine a man in 1960's Burgundy fulfilling his wife's request to ferry up a bottle of wine from the cellar to serve with a simple pan sauteed trout. He has pretty much two options: Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. Centuries of melding the local cooking and viticulture inform his choice of the Chardonnay. The trial and error phase was worked out long ago. It is common knowledge that the Pinot would most likely overwhelm the delicate fish, because of its weight and tannins. With fewer choices, it's simpler.

Tip #1: Shrink your world in order to master it. Begin by focusing in depth on one Old World region where the pairing groundwork has been laid for you. Taste broadly from the wines grown there, accompanied by traditional dishes.

This gives you the sense of how the varietal is supposed to taste, because you are getting it from its very roots. It gives meaning to the notion of terroir, or as the old chef's adage goes, "things that grow together, go together."Taste the same types of wines from neighboring vineyards to gain exposure to their unique traits and variations made by microclimates. Notice how food preparation adapts accordingly. You will begin to see patterns underlying which flavors marry well with others and why. When you expand your tasting to include other regions where the grape is grown, you will have a basis of comparison from which to construct food pairings

Tip #2. Perfect a menu with your group based on the area you've been studying. Start with making one or two appetizers and select 3-4 wines you've learned are typically drunk with them. See what works best. Do this with every course until you feel confident enough to pull off a whole menu that will leave everyone begging you to do it again..

We'll stick with Burgundy for an example. Make the classic, crayfish tails in creamy Nantua butter sauce.

This is a rich, yet subtly flavored dish, which needs a luxurious, yet ethereal wine. Select a Chablis, a Meursault and a Puligny-Montrachet to try with it. Make sure you have one wine that is unoaked, most likely the Chablis, and at least one that is. Reliable, readily available producers are: Boillot, Drouhin, Jadot and Leflaive. Even if one doesn't pair perfectly, how bad can it be? You're drinking white Burgundy!

Which brings me to my last point; knowledge gives you more power to indulge your gluttonous liasons with assurance, but remember to keep it low pressure. As my first (and favorite) wine educator, Pamela S. Busch (http://www.cavwinebar.com/about/pamela.html), is fond of saying, "Don't get overly caught up in searching for the Holy Grail of food and wine pairing. After all, it's only fermented grape juice!"