Soy sauce and red Burgundy
Seems unexpected: soy sauce in Pinot Noir? Standard red Burgundy descriptions of cherry and earth that are present in most red Burgundy tasting notes are nothing to write home about. What's always remarkable and inspiring to me are the out-of-place tastes I occasionally discern in wine, especially when it's paired with the right food. The secret to my pork ribs is gentle boiling with asian spices for 1-1.5 hours, and then quickly baking / broiling while applying several layers of the secret sauce, soy sauce being one major ingredient. The amazing thing is how well this 2005 Domaine Rene Lecrerc Gevrey Chambertin "Les Champeaux" Burgundy complemented the ribs, bringing out the darker "soy sauce meets cola" flavors of the wine.
I had already observed that Pinot Noir and Gamay pair well with Cantonese food. Slowly a hypothesis crystallized - I started figuring out that it may be due to the common use of soy-sauce in Cantonese cooking. Last night was the second time I tried the ribs / red Burgundy combo - the first time the ribs had been slow-cooked in a clay-pot, while this time I thought the baked flavor was an even better match to this substantial Burg from the stellar 2005 vintage.
And the thing is - had I not had the ribs, I probably would have never found soy sauce in the wine. Ah, the rare moments of brilliance, they are always so heart-warming and so unexpected!
Comments
Food [weight] = Wine [weight]
Food [flavor intensity] = Wine [flavor intensity]
In this respect the sauce of foods is a critical component to understand.
Matching flavors is secondary to the above fundamentals and far more subjective. Flavors detail beyond red fruit, black fruit, herbaceous, etc. is completely subjective. The reality is that a wine doesn't have the taste of "strawberries" for example. It's creative license and is largely the imagination that projects this "strawberry" flavor onto the wine. Have you seen those chefs on Hell's Kitchen taste foods blind? Most people couldn't identify real strawberry or raspberry flavors tasting the actual foods blind let alone those flavors in wine for example. People identify with flavors however and it is far more sexy to talk about them than matching weight or intensity. People say, "oh this wine has nutmeg." I wonder if those people could identify nutmeg itself blind.
My descriptors are always crazy and flowery, but that's because I like the spontaneity and creativity of the words the experience gives me. I decided long ago that after 6 agonizing years of engineering school, I wasn't gonna apply formulas to the pure pleasure of vino...
Now the table I saw at Zibibbo with Silver Oak and oysters--now THAT's unforgiveable!
;-0
See y'all Thursday!
Flavors are fun and appealing. The problem is people take their flowery fantasy totally too seriously. :P
Back to my day job trying to make PC processors sound interesting.. You KNOW I am a spinner if I can do that, hahahaha!
The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And that's why wine is as interesting a subject as it is. Matching weight and intensity of food and wine makes scientific sense and is definitely part of the food/wine pairing mystery, while matching flavor profiles just makes both the wine and food that much more enjoyable, and that's why we drink and eat as often as we do.