A Caveat About Blind Tastings: Some Vintages Work Well With Foods

The best wine in a blind tasting is often the best wine to buy. At least it has passed a quality test.

In a blind tasting, the evaluators have no knowledge of the label and therefore can’t be prejudiced for or against a particular wine because of past experiences with it, or with other wines from the same winery.

Blind tasting levels the playing field for wines of widely divergent prices too. This is significant because price is not a major factor in determining quality.

For example, a winery that bought its vineyard in 1934 and makes its Chardonnay from grapes growing on that vineyard can sell the wine for $8 a bottle and make a fair profit. That’s because the cost of the raw material, the grapes, is little more than the cost to farm the vineyard plus the cost of oak barrels to age the wine.

On the other hand, the winery that buys grapes at $1,800 a ton is paying nearly $3 for the juice inside each bottle, and with salaries, processing, oak barrels and other cost factors, the wine must sell for more than $8--considerably more.

(It has been estimated that the cost of a bottle of wine should equal the cost of a ton of grapes for the wine times .01, which would make the Chardonnay from $1,800-a-ton grapes sell for $18 a bottle.)

Blind tasting also eliminates the bias we all feel against wines from unknown wine regions. Seeing he’ll be tasting a Chardonnay from New Mexico, a judge might wince, yet in a blind tasting, the only thing that matters is wine quality. (And New Mexico has a thriving and improving wine industry.)

On the other hand, blind tasting of wine is really only one element to the ultimate goal of enjoyment of wine. The other is simply: how does the wine go with food?

It is an area of no precise answers because of the obvious drawbacks. Look at the pitfalls in logistics alone:

A fine Chardonnay wins a blind tasting. It is perfectly made and harmonious, offering fine flavors and good balance. Then someone brings to the dinner table two dishes, a salad with rice wine vinegar and baked salmon. The wine tastes awful with the salad (of course), but superb with the fish.

Even though it is not a science and the hazards are obvious, exploring the great wine and food combinations is a quest of loads of people. Books have been written on the subject, people have made careers out of lecturing on it, and it is so fascinating that chefs around the world have recently doted on the idea that a dish once thought classic might well be improved to match better with wine.

Joshua Wesson, a master sommelier and co-author (with David Rosengarten) of “Red Wine With Fish,” explored wine and food combinations in his book and in his newsletter, the Wine and Food Companion.

He notes that just because a dish goes with a particular Chardonnay doesn’t mean it goes with all Chardonnays.

“Three wines made from the same grape could lead people to three different conclusions about their food affinity,” he said. One wine may enhance the dish, one may diminish it and a third may make no statement whatever.

He said, however, that just tasting the wine, by itself, is often not a good clue to how it will match with certain foods.

“I look at wine the way I look at people,” he said. “We’re all equal but some are more equal than others. Every wine will have one element that makes it stand out. It’s rare to find three Chardonnays that taste so similar to one another that you would be hard-pressed to differentiate one from another.

“And some wines that taste good without food don’t work very well with food.”

In researching their book, Wesson and Rosengarten evaluated the wines first, without food. Then the wines were paired with food.

“Sometimes you can predict accurately a wine and food match in your head, but more often than not, we found that although we came close, we didn’t hit the nail on the head until we tried many wines to find an ideal match.”

The quest is not incidental, by the way, especially for the person who has a great (and expensive) wine that he wants to pour with dinner and he wants the dinner to enhance the wine, and vice versa.

“You can have wines that are ennobled by a dish, and you can have wines that are diminished by a dish,” said Wesson, and there are combinations that make both the food and the wine better.

“And you can’t really put a pleasure quotient on any of this. Matches come in different shapes and styles . . . but obviously it’s better to have a modest wine ennobled. I hate having my Montrachet stepped on.”

A problem in using blind-tasting evaluations as a sole guide to what wines will go with food is that blind tastings almost never are done with food on the table. And, said Wesson, “The biggest wines often win wine tastings and these are not usually the best wines for food.”

To that end, Wesson and Rosengarten, in their newsletter, taste specific wines with specific dishes, usually at well-regarded restaurants. They list the ingredients of the dishes and, using wit to make the text readable, rank the wines on how well they felt they went with the dishes.

Exploring this further, Wine Country International Magazine, based in northern California, stages a series of tastings that it publishes six times a year looking into the question of wine and food pairings. A recent adventure into this format was most interesting.

Four judges were invited to the elegant Lodge at Pebble Beach and its newer sister property, the Inn at Spanish Bay, to evaluate Chardonnays and Cabernets in a standard blind tasting.

All the wines were scored, then all the winners--10 Chardonnays and 10 Cabernets--were poured later in the day, again blind, before an amazing array of food prepared by the chefs of the two inns.

The goal was to select the best wine-food matches to create a four-course summer meal.

The interesting thing was that the top-rated wines in terms of raw scores in the blind tasting were not the wines favored by the panel members when it came time to pair wines with food. Indeed, a 1988 Louis Martini Chardonnay ($9.50) went beautifully with a number of the dishes even though it wasn’t ranked above fifth in the overall tasting portion of the event.

The other day I was chatting with Julie Garvey, co-owner of Flora Springs winery in the Napa Valley. Flora Springs wine maker Ken Deis makes a stylish Chardonnay that accents complexity and richness and offers less in the way of overt tutti-frutti aromas.

The 1988 Flora Springs Chardonnay ($23.50) is a truly elegant and beautifully structured wine that is clearly suited to be served with food. It should not be well-chilled either. It’s best to serve it at cellar temperature, no cooler than 55 degrees, to experience the nuance in the wine.

“As we have matured in the last decade,” said Garvey, rather wistfully the other day, “we are getting fewer gold medals for our wines, but we are making wines that are better than ever.”

Deis noted that showy wines often win medals and may be served with food and no one will complain, but “balanced wines like this go better with food. The wine tastes better and the food tastes better”

Subscriptions to the Wine and Food Companion, $36 a year (six issues), may be obtained by writing to Context Communications Inc., 250 East 73rd St., Suite 14-H, New York, N.Y. 10021.

Subscriptions to Wine Country International are $16 a year (six issues). Write to Wine Country International, 985 Lincoln Ave., Benicia, Calif. 94510.

Wine of the Week

1988 Zaca Mesa Reserve Pinot Noir ($15)--Excellent Pinot fruit of cherries enhanced by a delicate cinnamon and clove element, and a touch of toastiness from the barrels in which it was aged. None of the vegetal characteristics that pervade so many Central Coast Pinot Noirs. Wine maker Gale Sysock has made great strides with Pinot Noir in the last few years, and this wine is his latest winner.