Food (and wine) for thought

Why and how does wine make you hungry? I have a library of wine books and none of them provides an answer to this engrossing question, though wine has long been prescribed as an appetite stimulant.

I don’t think it can simply be the alcohol. In my experience, a gin and tonic deadens rather than sharpens the appetite, while beer in any volume seems filling rather than appetising. But almost any quantity of wine seems to stimulate the taste buds and leaves me at least increasingly desperate for some solid matter. Why else do I find myself nibbling the dry water biscuits that constitute the food most often provided at wine tastings? They taste like cardboard but then food with any distracting flavour is conventionally eschewed when showing off wines to professionals.

It is not that the members of the wine trade are not generous hosts – anything but. But they tend to serve food only after a tasting and somewhere separate from the tasting room, perhaps believing that the aromas of the food would otherwise interfere with the bouquet of the wines.

There is an old wine trade maxim, “buy on an apple, sell on cheese”, a nod to the fact that cheese generally flatters wine while the sweetness and acidity of an apple does the opposite. But I think this was devised for an age when gentlemen wine merchants presented a handful of wines to gentlemen buyers. Today’s wine enthusiasts are made of sterner stuff. We often, in one of the wine trade’s gentler euphemisms, “look at” scores of different wines at a time. This means that by the end of a session, tasters are frequently absolutely ravenous.

Put this together with the fact that, in general, the finest wines are typically saved for the end of a tasting, and you are left with the sad reality that tasters can all too often be distracted from the glories of the greatest bottles by the gnawing in the pit of their stomachs. Many is the time that I have sat for hours with others over the niceties of a string of ancient vintages dreaming of lunch or dinner. And, when I conduct tastings for non-professional wine lovers, I often find that they start asking wistfully about food pairings around halfway through.

At large wine trade fairs, there is rarely anything more substantial on the tasting tables than those dry biscuits. The shining exception to this in my experience is Vinitaly, Italy’s annual wine fair in Verona, where producers tend to offer delicious cheeses and salami alongside their wines. Italian wines are so obviously designed to go with food, after all. But the majority of producers in the New World seem to want to show off their wines in a pure, unadorned state. One famous California producer once cancelled the meeting he had proposed when I suggested that we meet over lunch, apparently believing that his wines should not be required to compete with any other call on my attention.

But the more tastings I experience, the more I’m convinced that food is no distraction to wine evaluation. Last month, I had the pleasure of spending a couple of days in the old monks’ refectory of the Kloster Eberbach, the 12th- century Cistercian monastery in the woods above the Rhine in the snowy Rheingau. The cellar here is one of the most copiously furnished of any I know and the purpose of our stay was to taste Rieslings made there from a grand total of 100 different vintages, back to an 1846 Steinberger.

Many were the revelations – not least that the sort of Rieslings made before the second world war were, typically, bone dry and around 13% alcohol – and also the longevity of most of them. I found myself suggesting that the drinking window of several wines might be something like “1920-2020”. But what helped the 15 or so tasters assembled enormously was that, rather than tasting in one long session and then eating, we were served little portions of well-judged dishes between each flight of (generally a dozen) wines.

So, for example, after a dozen dry Riesling Cabinet wines (so called because the cabinet was supposed to be reserved for the best wines of each year) that took us back from 1917 to that 1846 (made long before the unification of Germany), we were each brought a little bowl of dense ham and tiny fresh pea soup. After a range of richer Auslesen from a 1968 that was probably the best wine from that vintage I have ever tasted, back to a rather faded 1929, we were served three shredded beef ravioli in creamy leek sauce. (Contrary to popular belief, Rieslings can partner a wide range of savoury foods.)

I must say that I didn’t find these little morsels remotely distracting, and although they were often headily scented, their aromas were quickly absorbed into those of the room in general. They made us tasters feel even better able to concentrate on the wines, because we never had to contend with hunger.

Similarly, at the retrospective tastings to celebrate the half century of Ridge in California, about which I wrote last week, it was a huge delight to find all 12 of the vintages we were to be served at the dinners already poured at our places in three flights to be served with successive courses. This meant not only that there wasn’t the distraction of waiters with bottles hovering over us but also that the wines had plenty of time to open up and develop in the glasses. Again, these were wines with the longevity to make this a worthwhile exercise.

Ridge’s philosophy has always been that wine is made to be drunk with food and I can only concur. There are wines, such as champagne and manzanilla sherry, that serve perfectly as warm-up acts for a meal but, basically, I believe that most wines give the greatest pleasure, and wreak the least havoc, when drunk with food. I also believe that the business of matching wine and food causes an unnecessary amount of angst.  In China recently, I had the impression that Chinese concern about how to choose a single wine to go with the variety of dishes served concurrently in so many Chinese meals is a serious brake on the nation’s growing love affair with wine.

It’s wonderful when you find an absolutely perfect combination of solid and liquid, but awfully rare. Usually, in my experience, wine and food rub along companionably but with the odd spat – not unlike any marriage. And if the wine and food really clash, just have a sip of water in between – not a bad policy, anyway, for health reasons.