A Wine and Beef Revolution
Some time ago while dining at the Five Crowns restaurant in Corona del Mar I ordered the house specialty, Prime Rib. I selected a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from the wine list which was opened before my perfect slab of meat arrived. A few sips into the wine, I marveled at how good it was—quintessential Napa with all its oak, bold fruit and nicely framed tannins.
Another story quickly emerged after I ate my first few bites of juicy medium-rare perfection. My wine, which moments earlier had satisfied me completely, turned awkward and disjointed, acid asserting itself here, tannin bullying its way there, the fruit, for lack of more specificity, turning acrid. In short, my food diminished my wine to the point of making it undrinkable.
What the hell happened?
When I returned to my Cabernet after my plate was taken away, the wine, when consumed by itself, returned to its delightful pre-dinner self. This Cabernet wasn’t made for that food, obviously.
Red wines are our knee-jerk default whenever the subject of beef and wine comes up, particularly Cabernet Sauvignon, America’s king of red wines. After my Five Crowns experience where it performed so poorly, maybe the ideal pairing lay elsewhere. Years later, I discovered the Cabernet Francs from the Loire Valley where I noticed the opposite dynamic happened with red meat: the Saumur-Champignys, Chinons, and Bourgueils were tight and closed until a few bites later the wines opened up and became opulent. This was wine and food pairing the way it should be.
I thought of these lessons recently when I read an essay written by Tom Wolf of Kermit Lynch Imports which blew open the doors of possibility when he experimented with wines you and I might never have thought of when selecting candidates for our next steak dinner.
Tom had bought a quarter side of beef from a local farm and packed boxes of a wide range of cut beef in his trunk, and “a flurry of new recipe ideas” swirled in his head.
In the real world we eat beef in a lot of ways, some exciting dishes not coming from historic wine cultures, like carne asada, Asian-style beef and broccoli, Korean barbecue, Japanese teriyaki and well, you get the point. Many beef dishes utilize hot peppers which are notorious wine-killers, some have sweet sauces that make dry wine excruciatingly tart.
What Tom did with his beef and wine experiments were nothing less than revolutionary. As he described his adventure, “In the weeks that followed, I struck gold again and again in the kitchen.” One of his first triumphs was pairing his beef and broccoli with a Loire Pinot Gris rosé whose “crisp citrus and faint salinity proved to be the perfect chaser for the soy-ginger glaze coating the broccoli and thin strups of flank steak.”
The next month he created a miso and ginger chuck roast and paired it with a simple Alsace dry Riesling. The next night he “warmed up the leftover shredded beef for tacos, combining it with some guacamole, coleslaw and hot salsa.” He served a fruity sparkling Bugey-Cerdon, “whose residual sugar softened the salsa’s spice. I’m not sure there’s a better wine out there for taco or enchilada night.” I’ve always enjoyed the gentle charm of Bugey-Cerdon (a specialty grown between Burgundy and Jura), but until now, I had never thought of it as a Mexican food wine. It makes sense the same way Sangria makes sense. I gotta try it now.
A Tuscan Sangiovese rosato was recommended to Tom by his colleague Anthony Lynch who had been served it with “sliced tenderloin in featherweight pieces of carpaccio topped with shaved parmesan, arugula, black pepper, and olive oil, one of my favorite pairings ever,” said Anthony.
Tom then wrote about drinking a robust south-of-France rosé like those from Bandol with the tenderness of a filet mignon which paired “beautifully,” and “elegant sparklers like Champalou’s Vouvray Brut put the best final touch on a steak frites or cheeseburger.”
Another “hard to beat” suggestion was a seared or grilled steak paired with a northern Rhone Syrah or a Pinot Noir from northern Burgundy. (This might be a great opportunity to introduce yourselves to the energetic Pinots of Irancy, located not far from Chablis.)
Tom Wolf summed up his beef experience this way:
“These last several months have served as an inspiring reminder that there’s more to beef than steak and burgers, and when you go even just one extra step in the creativity department in the kitchen, this opens you up to all kinds of revelatory wine pairings beyond the classics.”
More and more I am going to the lighter reds with meats. I love a good Chanti or Pinot Noir.
You look good in your picture! I just moved to
Prescott AZ and I am trying some wine from here. I have found some good ones! Take care
And let me know if you can ship to AZ, Christmas is around the corner!