'Queer Eye’ wine guru Ted Allen: Be curious and ask questions

Ted Allen has become a familiar TV presence through his appearances on Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Top Chef, where he was a frequent guest judge, and on Food Network’s Iron Chef America and his own shows Chopped and Food Detectives. Allen’s wit and ease make him a natural TV personality, and he has that enviable ability to make complicated-seeming things sound simple.

That’s his mission with an online contest he’s doing with Robert Mondavi Discover Wine. At www.discover-wine.com/contests.php, Allen is soliciting questions about food and wine: Local people who submit the top five questions will receive an hourlong wine class with Allen when he’s in Dallas-Fort Worth on May 8 for Taste Addison, as well as a VIP dinner and other prizes. Allen chatted about food and wine during a recent phone interview.

Let’s start with going into a little more detail about the contest.

The work that I do with Robert Mondavi is mostly about trying to break down barriers that people perceive between themselves and wine, and the idea that it’s such an overwhelming, complicated subject. I think the wine industry has worked very hard for many centuries to make wine as intimidating and complicated as possible, or that they’ve just given it no thought at all. I’m more interested in reaching people that don’t have wine in their lives and making it more accessible to them.

I was intimidated by wine until I took a Napa Valley trip a couple of years ago and realized to just drink what I enjoy.

I think that’s a great lesson that more people should learn. The two things I try to encourage newcomers to do is: taste a lot, try lots of wines, don’t just think of yourself as a white zinfandel person or a pinot noir person, try anything you’re curious about. The other thing is, don’t be afraid to ask questions. More often than not, when I go to a restaurant, I want to know what wine they’re excited about, or what wine goes especially well with the dish I’m ordering.

The old-school idea was that you needed to go in and outsmart the wine steward or that he’d look down his nose at you if you didn’t have encyclopedic knowledge. Not everybody has time to learn that stuff — just ask. Nine times out of 10, if you’re in a decent restaurant, they want you to ask. They want to play show and tell with you. They want to show how much cooler they are than the other restaurants, because they found this little wine in some village in Spain, and they’re the only ones who have it.

Is there too much emphasis on pairing reds or whites with certain types of food?

Here’s the thing about red wine with beef/white wine with fish: This is a very basic rule in wine pairing, but some people think that rule came down on high from somebody in France, and it’s just a rule. There’s a reason for it: beef is a big, bold flavor, and it needs a big, bold wine to complement it appropriately. If you’ve got a big, bold wine with a delicate piece of fish, you won’t be able to taste the fish, because the wine will overwhelm it.

However, that’s the most simplistic thinking of that pairing idea. If you examine it a little further, it’s just as important: How did you cook the fish? If you cooked the fish over a wood fire, a smoky charcoal fire, and then put a veracruzano sauce on it with olives and tomatoes and garlic, that’s a very intense sauce. That’s no longer a delicate dish. It’s a big, bold powerful dish that will overwhelm a white wine. So the good news is, yes, you should drink what you like and it’s simpler than you might have thought; the bad news is, it’s not just red wine with beef/white wine with fish, it’s, "How did you cook the fish?"

How did you take this plunge into wine knowledge?

Like a lot of us, I kind of had a little epiphany with food and wine. I’ve always loved to cook, even when I was a little kid. I got more serious when I started working for Chicago magazine, because that magazine is really into food and restaurants. It’s kind of a restaurant bible in that town. I had a dinner at a restaurant called the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Chicago, and the chef there did a pairing of some kind of chocolate cake with a white dessert wine. I didn’t know anything about dessert wine, and I never would’ve thought that a white dessert wine would make any sense with the rich chocolaty flavors of a cake like that. And it did, and the wine had notes of orange in it, and orange goes well with chocolate, and it just blew me away.

I’m not intimidated by food of any sort — except when it comes to cooking it. How do I overcome that intimidation?

It helps if you have friends who also like to cook or want to learn to cook. That’s what inspired me to just kind of do it more. There’s a reason why chefs can touch a steak with their finger and know whether it’s medium-rare or medium, and it’s the fact that they cook 150 of them a night. So much of cooking is about learning how something should smell and feel and look before you even stick a thermometer in it; most chefs hardly ever do.  . . . But most of us can cook. I love it when I’m at a book-signing and somebody will come up to me and say, "I can’t cook," and then I’ll say, "But you’re a lawyer. You went to University of Michigan law school. I think you know how to read instructions."

Ted Allen will visit North Texas on May 8. Robert Houser