A perfect match that’s hitting the road

Pinot Noir-based wines -- especially those made in Burgundy -- are my absolute favorites in the entire world of wine. I drink them, and serve them, with everything from sole to salmon to sausage to steak, everything from roast chicken to rack of lamb to Roquefort cheese.

So I get this invitation -- three invitations really, one each by telephone, e-mail and regular mail -- to a “Pinot and Pork” tasting in Santa Monica. And then I see the tasting mentioned on thefoodsection.com, and I hear that the same hog-and-pony show will be repeated in six cities, from sea to porking sea.

It’s precisely the kind of event that I normally wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot Polish sausage. Eating and drinking standing up, juggling my food and spilling my wine as I stumble among strangers is not my idea of a good time, even at the relatively reasonable price of $65 for this one.

But I do love Pinot. And pork is the meat I like in more different preparations than any other. Barbecue ribs. Porchetta sandwiches. Roast suckling pig. Bacon. Baked ham. Roast pork. Prosciutto. Serrano ham. Pork chops. Need I go on?

So I bit back my journalistic skepticism and headed to Santa Monica last week with as strong a predisposition to enjoy myself as a sailor on shore leave. And enjoy myself I did.

The tasting was conducted for the benefit of Slow Food U.S.A., an organization dedicated to the preservation and enjoyment of traditional and artisanal foods. The sponsor was Kobrand Corp., marketing and sales agent for the wines that were served.

The announced intent of the event -- apart, of course, from raising money for Slow Food and gaining attention for Kobrand’s wine clients -- was “exposing the general public to the diversity and versatility of pork and Pinot,” in the words of Livia Alyson Careaga of Kobrand.

Pinot is almost as fragile and difficult as it is versatile, so there’s plenty of bad Pinot out there. But great Pinot -- even good Pinot -- can be both elegant and robust, silky and strong, with a pronounced bouquet and taste of ripe red fruit that always reminds you it’s a beverage, intended to be consumed with food. That’s why it goes with virtually everything. Why pork in particular?

Josie LeBalch, chef at Josie’s in Santa Monica, thinks it’s because the acid in Pinot “balances well against the fat in pork, while lighter Pinots in particular don’t ruin the delicacy of the pork.”

Chris Benziger of Benziger Family Winery says that pork and Pinot have distinctive flavors but that both are mild, so they complement each other -- and because pork is so mild, “it’s often made with sauces that have a certain sweetness, and that picks up on the sweetness of the fruit in a good Pinot.”

Benziger and I were having this conversation as I stood drinking his 2000 Pinot and eating LeBalch’s slice of pork tenderloin served with a sweet potato puree and a salad of frisee, Gorgonzola and grapes. Guess what? The sweetness of the dish did, indeed, draw out the sweet notes in the Pinot.

Sometimes, I think chefs worry that pork is too mild, though, and they go overboard with their sweet sauces. That’s what happened with one of the other dishes at the tasting, a plum-braised barbecued pork sandwich topped with coleslaw from Balboa restaurant on the Sunset Strip. The plum flavor was cloyingly sweet. It overwhelmed both the pork and the 2001 Domaine Carneros Pinot.

But I was willing to cut Balboa a little slack. After all, it’s a steakhouse. Maybe the chef is so accustomed to working with beef, which can stand up to most anything, that he didn’t think the dish through carefully. (That, incidentally, is why many chefs tell me they don’t much like cooking with beef. Unlike most fish and, to a lesser extent, pork, which are mild enough to be almost blank canvases on which chefs can work their saucing magic, beef is so strongly flavored that it leaves fewer options for creativity.)

Josie’s and Balboa were two of the eight restaurants that -- along with Niman Ranch -- provided the pork dishes that accompanied the various Pinots at last week’s tasting. Niman’s was the simplest of the offerings -- two kinds of salami, thinly sliced, one served with baby arugula, the other with fresh basil, plus an open-faced sandwich of dry-cured, applewood-smoked ham, topped with mustard, sliced radish and sliced cornichon.

As a lover of good smoked meats, I couldn’t have been happier, and in this case, I found the 2001 Foley Estates Pinot Noir from the Santa Maria Valley an ideal partner for both salamis and the ham.

But I do prefer the “real thing” -- red Burgundy -- and one of my favorite pairings of the day was Louis Jadot’s 2001 Gevrey-Chambertin, a modest village wine that nonetheless had enough depth to stand up to the barbecued pork butt with celery root slaw and a mildly spicy sauce made with dried chipotles and sun-dried smoked tomatoes provided by chef Suzanne Tracht from Jar restaurant on Beverly Boulevard.

“Pinot goes especially well with rustic kinds of meat, barbecued and grilled pork in particular,” Tracht told me.

A clever twist

Another Jadot village wine, the 2001 Pommard, was probably the best wine of the day. But for me, the single best taste of the day, wine or food, was a braised pork belly with dry-braised greens from Yi Cuisine, a restaurant I hadn’t even heard of (perhaps because it hasn’t opened yet. It will, probably next month, down the street from A.O.C. on 3rd Street). The pork belly was paired with ... no, not another Jadot wine, not a single-vineyard Rochioli Pinot but -- I know, I know, the suspense is killing you ... a nonvintage Champagne Rose from Taittinger.

One doesn’t instantly think of Champagne as a Pinot, but it is, of course -- made with Pinot Noir grapes, as well as Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier. I could almost swear the pork belly made the not-quite-sweet, but definitely fruity, Pinot Noir notes seem more pronounced. On the other hand, maybe the power of suggestion -- combined with my admitted predisposition to like most of what I ate and drank that day -- led my sense of imagination astray.

Several Champagne makers -- and the makers of a couple of domestic sparkling wines -- have tried in recent years to convince me that one can drink Champagne with anything and everything, even all the way through a dinner of a dozen or more courses.

But while I’m not one of those wine tyrants who insist “you must drink this wine with this food,” some pairings do work better than others.

I find that as much as I love Champagne as an aperitif and with, say, caviar or smoked salmon, among other dishes, the bubbles in Champagne ultimately begin to fill me up and conflict with many food flavors and, frankly, I get bored after three or four glasses.

But the Taittinger bubbles cut right through the rich, fatty taste of the pork belly, and the residual sweetness of both the food and the wine married in a way that made me wonder if I’ll have to rethink the question of an entire dinner with Champagne. And that was the whole idea behind the tasting -- to get folks to think about the food-wine connection.

Mission accomplished.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous Matters of Taste columns, go to latimes.com /shaw-taste.