More restaurants offering tasting menus with wine pairings
As soon as we get a chance, Dottie is going to prepare her famous roast duck and serve it with a Riesling Spatlese from Germany. This is quite radical for us. We always pair this special dish with fine red Burgundy or American Pinot Noir. But when we returned from our annual trip to Disney World, along with our suntans and eight pounds of hotel soaps, we brought back something unusual: a new wine-food pairing idea.
Just about every day, we receive a letter from someone asking us what wine will go with a certain dish. Books have been written with extensive lists of "perfect" pairings. But there are so many variables in each pairing -- the sauces, the spices and personal taste among them -- that it's impossible to know what will work best. What's fun is trying.
More restaurants are showing the way. It's hard to believe now that the whole idea of a tasting menu was foreign in the U.S. not too long ago. And the idea of pairing each dish of a tasting menu with a wine was even more obscure. Just a few years ago, when we went into some of America's finest restaurants and asked the sommelier to pair each of our courses with a wine, we were often met with quizzical looks.
Now, tasting menus with wine pairings are common, not just at great restaurants like the French Laundry in Yountsville, Calif., and Charlie Trotter's in Chicago, but even at many less-formal, local places. And while not all of them are successful -- we've had some pairings that seemed more driven by what bottles happened to be open than by complementary tastes -- they're always worth a try to see how the professionals try to make food and wine dance together.
We have been visiting Disney World since 1974 and have seen its attention to wine soar. That has leveled off in the past few years -- the wine lists are not nearly as dynamic as they once were and the prices on everyday wines continue to be outrageously high -- but Victoria & Albert's, in the Grand Floridian Resort & Spa, continues to be a great destination for a marriage of wine and food.
We made reservations six months in advance for the chef's table and, by total accident, happened to be there on Father's Day, which was a treat for John. Our wine-pairing dinner there ($165 per person, plus $75 per person for the wine pairing) is a good demonstration of how the experts try to pair things.
After we returned home, we called the man in charge of Victoria & Albert's, Israel Perez, who handles the wine-pairing personally, to ask him about it. "Food comes first," said Perez, who has worked in Disney World restaurants, including the California Grill and Artist Point, for 19 years. "I'm not going to dictate to the chef (Scott Hunnel) what he's going to make. Whatever he wants to put on the menu, he makes and I try to identify some of the main flavor profiles in the dish to make the pairings. A little bit of wine pairing is from experience, but sometimes a particular sauce comes into play so I may have to change my own mind."
The best and most surprising pairing of the night was the Spatlese with the quail. This is the match that had us thinking about Dottie's duck. We would have thought Pinot Noir would be perfect with the quail but, in any case, wouldn't have thought about a slightly sweet Riesling. In fact, they seemed to have been made for each other, with the sweet earthiness and great acidity of the wine pairing perfectly with the dark earthiness of the dish.
It really is worth the time and trouble to look for a nearby restaurant that offers wine-food pairings. Some do this every night, while some others have special events on a regular basis (good wine stores often know about these).
It's not just a delicious way to spend a night, but also an opportunity to gather mouth-watering wine-food pairing ideas to try at home. As for us, we're off to buy a duck.