Vanessa Price - Big Macs & Burgundy: Wine Pairings for the Real World

forBreanna

Once... in the wilds of Afghanistan, I lost my corkscrew, and wewere forced to live on nothing but food and water for days.

W. C. Fields

Contents

Sancerre is a town in the Loire Valley of France that produces benchmark Sauvignon Blanc with crazy acidity, pure minerality, and cheek-puckering citrus.

It goes perfectly with Cheetos.

I know this because I have paired Sauvignon Blanc with Taco Bells entire menu, the countrys most popular movie candy, almost everything in the supermarket frozen food aisle, including Hot Pockets Philly Steak & Cheese (with and without Croissant Crust), and pretty much every other mass-produced foodstuff you can think ofand returned from the field with one of the most important oenophilic discoveries of our time.

Sancerre and Cheetos go together like milk and cookies. Its a pairing so deceptively and fundamentally delicious, it has eluded almost every wine expert colleague I knowright up until the moment they polish off a bag and a bottle for themselves.

The sense science behind this unholy alliance of artificially flavored puffed cornmeal and serious wine is as elemental as acid, fat, salt, and mineralsthe very same principles that explain the harmonious bond between oysters and Chablis or filet mignon and Napa Cab.

In fact, Ive spent the better part of fifteen years in the wine industry as a trained sommelier thinking about exactly what makes pairings work, then testing and retesting my craziest hypotheses on unsuspecting friends and loved ones. I turned some of that hard-earned knowledge into a column for New York magazines Grub Street, and the enthusiastic response Ive received from readers like you has only confirmed what Ive known for a long time: Theres a whole world of entirely fun, entirely accessible, and often entirely counterintuitive wine pairings out there waiting to be discovered.

Its also been a constant reminder that theres an entire planet full of people who love wine as much as I do but have never had the opportunity to learn about it the right waythrough informed experimentation. Theyre the same people who might drink three or four different bottles per week (or more during a pandemic), yet are so turned off by the inaccessible snobbery of winespeak that they generally avoid it altogether. Sound familiar?

If so, this book is for you. As someone who has been lucky enough to experience some of the greatest chef-sommelier tasting menus in the world, I can say with certainty that you dont need truffle-dusted sunchokes or sous-vide pheasant loins to unlock the joys of a fabulous or even just-plain-good bottle of wine. It can be done gloriously with something as basic as Funfetti cake. There

are exceptional pairings to be had almost anywhere, from the local gas-station snack rack to your favorite Grubhub guilty pleasure order.

The art of pairing food with wine is not without its mysteries, but its far from a mystical trick of culinary alchemy. At its most basic, its the informed process of combining complementary flavors and textures, either through contrast or accentuation, to create perfect balance. And when you get it just right, your palate finds equilibrium with each swallow.

If your food has a lot of fat, it needs a sharp, acidic wine to cut through it; if it has heat and spice, a high-sugar wine will soften the intensity. Bitter foods want something deep and lush to counteract them, while certain rich and powerful dishes can call for congruent pairings, which means doubling down on all the attributes that make something delicious to begin with. The same rule of congruency applies to fresh and citrusy fare: Your ideal wine will reflect that light, bright character.

As youll learn throughout these pages, a great food and wine pairing both heightens and, to a degree, cancels out its counterpart. Its a principle thats been put into practice for thousands of years in the Mediterranean, where wine and food have long worked in symbiosis. While wines from the land of Dionysus may seem tannic, tart, or too sweet by themselves, Greek table varieties take on an entirely different and uncommonly satisfying character when consumed with certain kinds of food. The zesty sting of Santorini yields to charred octopus, while Retsina, an exotic, resinated wine with undercurrents of pine, is tempered by spicy lamb. Thats what food-friendly wine means. (I didnt make this term up, I promise.) And dont worry, by the time were done, youll understand that concept completely.

In the Burgundy region of France, theyll serve you White Burgundy with gougres, a savory puff pastry filled with a nutty cheese, typically Gruyre or Comt, which blends uncannily with the French-oak creaminess of their wine.

And if you ask them how long theyve been pairing those two things, theyll say

foreverits been going on for that many centuries.

Pairing in the modern senseas an expensive gastronomic experience

has only really been a thing since the 1980s. Thats when paired dishes and wines started appearing on the menus of fancy restaurants, usually in set-price, multi-course dinners with specific wines matched to individual dishes. For the most part, pairings have remained in that rarefied realm of tasting menus ever since, depriving the rest of us of one of lifes purest pleasures.

As Ill explain more deeply later, Sancerre works so well with Ca chance against heetos because of its salinity, light body, and raw bite. It makes sense that

the only grape that stands a chance against Chesters finger-staining orangey salt-powder is the rip-roaring acidity of white Sancerre, which has the added benefit of being highly texturedmeaning that when you swish it around it coats your mouth, giving it a fighting chance against all that Cheetos buildup. Each of the fleshy areas of your mouth, from the gums to the tongue to the roof and all the way back to your throat, provide sensory feedback to your brain, which lights up with pleasure when processing this kind of robust data.

White Sancerre also has a lot of what we in the business call minerality, that category of smells and flavors that arent fruity, spicy, or herbal, but rather flinty or chalky. Think of the subtle brine of an oyster, or of licking a rock. Sancerres minerality keeps the explosiveness of the nacho cheese in check.

Similar principles are at work in the shockingly delicious marriage of smores and Recioto della Valpolicella (). It is beautiful and surprising combinations like these, freed from the tyranny of three-figure ingredients and white tablecloths, that excite me most. And Im pretty sure theyll excite you, too.