Wining and Dining

It was the oddest combination--a glass of fine red Bordeaux with a mellow, buttery avocado--but it worked.

This unconventional first course set the tone for a dinner that paired red wines with monkfish, steamed chicken wrapped in romaine, a mixed lettuce salad and banana bread, all dishes you would not expect to go with such a forthright beverage.

The wines were from Chateau Prieure-Lichine; the menu was composed by Konstantin Schonbachler, executive chef of the Hollywood Diner, and the innovative combinations made one thing clear: The old rule that red wine goes with meat and white wine goes with poultry or fish is no match for modern California cuisine.

So how does one choose wine to accompany goat cheese salad, beef with raisins and peppercorns, grilled duck breast, foie gras with black pepper sauce, lemon-flavored pasta and all the rest?

The task is not as easy as one would hope. To achieve a perfect match of wine and food involves repeated tasting, some risk and, occasionally, failure. Even the best match may not be appreciated because palates differ. One wine lover’s delight can turn to acid in the mouth of another.

The recent Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Festival offered a case study in this elusive art. The yearly festival includes a marathon of wine-maker dinners designed to show off the wines through dishes that complement their attributes.

Post-mortem critiques with the chefs produced not only guidelines in choosing wine but reassurance that even the experts might do it differently the next time.

All agreed that it is important to sample a wine before pairing it with a dish and then to taste the two together.

“Sit down with some friends, taste the wine and talk about what flavors come to mind,” said Scott Douglass, executive chef of the Alisal Guest Ranch and Resort at Solvang. “If you are not overly experienced, go with your first reaction. Let the wine stand out, and try not to use more than three primary flavors in the dish.”

Douglass spent one month planning the menu for a dinner featuring wines from the nearby Gainey Vineyard. First he went to Gainey to taste the wines that were to be served. Then he rehearsed the dishes at home, testing them with the wines.

The tryouts led to a switch from veal to fillet of beef with a 1983 Cabernet Sauvignon. “The veal didn’t have enough flavor to stand up to the Cabernet,” Douglass said. To complement the pepperiness of the wine, he added green peppercorns to the sauce. To accent its fruitiness, he added cassis liqueur and a reduction of the Cabernet itself. For color and additional flavor, he garnished each serving with pink peppercorns and golden raisins that had been soaked in Cognac.

The dinner, held at Alisal ranch, started with gravlax (salmon) marinated with tarragon as well as the traditional dill. Both herbs suited the clean flavor of the accompanying wine, a 1985 Sauvignon Blanc, Douglass said. Asparagus, which Douglass had intended to serve, was eliminated because it made the wine taste bitter.

One would have expected a red wine with the next course, squab with a sauce that included foie gras. However, Douglass matched the squab to a 1985 Chardonnay and used the wine to deglaze the pans in which the birds were sauteed. “The Gainey Chardonnay has such nice, full, fruit flavor that I thought it would be strong enough. It was a little bit of a risk, but I thought it came out exceptionally well,” he said.

Matching Salad and Wine

The toughest job was matching salad and wine, but Douglass scored there, too. The wine was a fruity, slightly sweet 1986 Johannisberg Riesling. The salad was composed of goat cheese, pear and a mixture of lettuces dressed with Dijon mustard, honey, walnut oil and Champagne vinegar. The goat cheese had to be young and fresh, Douglass said. An older cheese would have been too sharp for the wine.

Gainey’s 1985 Special Select Late Harvest Johannisberg Riesling is an intensely sweet, honeyed wine. Douglass paired this with a layered dessert of genoise cake, raspberries and peach mousse topped with caramelized powdered sugar and accompanied with raspberry sauce and creme anglaise. “I wanted a dessert that would provide natural fruit flavor but not be too sweet,” he said. “A chocolate dessert would not have gone.”

Gainey wine maker Rick Longoria favors lowering the alcohol content of wine to make it more compatible with food. “Alcohol is fatiguing,” Longoria commented, and wines that are high in alcohol tend to overpower the food as well as the drinker. The Gainey late harvest dessert wine contains only 7.4% alcohol, barely above the minimum 7% alcohol required to classify a beverage as wine.

For another dinner, chef John Downey of Downey’s in Santa Barbara designed a menu to go with the products of four wineries. The dinner was hosted by wine maker Robert N. Lindquist of Qupe winery, whose wines dominated. The other wines filled the gaps in his line.

“The first thing I do is try to taste the wine. You get a feel. Sometimes something just jumps out and hits you,” Downey said. However, he had to match the Qupe 1982 Central Coast Syrah without a prior taste. As accompaniment, he prepared grilled, marinated Muscovy duck breast with a sauce made from the duck bones, veal stock, red wine and shallots. Cooked medium-rare, the duck was as crusty and full flavored as a steak. “The Syrah has a nice little tang to it so it would go well with something rich, and the Muscovy duck is richer than the average duck,” Downey said.

Later, after tasting the wine, Downey said he would have switched it to a preceding course of foie gras with black pepper sauce. Or he might have switched the black pepper sauce to the duck to complement the peppery flavor of the Syrah.

Downey said his decision to serve the foie gras with Qupe’s 1984 Chardonnay was “almost a little daring.” Normally, the brown sauce would call for a red wine. “Then again, I thought there was something of a link with the richness of the foie gras and the richness of the Chardonnay,” Downey said. The foie gras was set on a crouton flavored with herb butter, and the dish was garnished with sprigs of Italian parsley, tarragon and two types of thyme. Taken straight, the thyme was overpowering, but the tarragon combined pleasantly with the wine.

As guests arrived, they were handed glasses of a sparkling wine, Maison Deutz Brut Cuvee, and sat down to an appetizer plate that held home-cured ham, a quail egg, mushroom duxelles in puff pastry, a spoonful of light mustard sauce and a chervil sprig.

“I wasn’t trying too hard to match up anything there,” Downey said. “I wanted to have a little plate of something for people so they wouldn’t sit there with rumbling tums (stomachs).”

Wine and Appetizers

Next came the Qupe 1983 Chenin Blanc with another assortment of foods called “Taste of the Sea.” The tastes included mussels with chile vinaigrette; gravlax with fresh dill; rock crab on a wedge of cantaloupe; a slice of potato topped with Dijon mustard and home-smoked sea scallop; cucumber and red onion salad and a Belgian endive leaf that contained creme fraiche and golden caviar.

“I think that Chenin Blanc is a light, almost vivacious wine. I enjoy sipping it on a sunny summer day. That’s what it makes me think of,” Downey said. Therefore, he chose “nice, lively, light seafoods” as the appropriate accompaniment.

The salad course, which followed the foie gras, combined greens such as arugula, mache, and chicory with a variety of fresh herbs. Downey made the dressing with walnut oil, orange and lemon juice, Port wine and marjoram. “Citrus isn’t as powerful as vinegar against a wine,” he said. The wine in this case was the remainder of the Chardonnay that was poured with the foie gras.

Au Bon Climat 1984 Pinot Noir Reserve appeared with a plate of cheeses and fruit. Then came Austin Cellars 1981 Botrytis Sauvignon Blanc with the dessert: spun-caramel-topped peaches in a creme anglaise that was flavored with roasted almonds.

“That was very obviously a ‘peachy’ wine,” Downey said. And since peach pits contain the so-called bitter almond, he chose to coat the fruit with almond-flavored sauce.

The most controversial pairing at the wine-maker dinners may have been the match of Vega Vineyards’ dry 1983 Gewurztraminer with a frozen lemon mousse. “That raised some eyebrows, didn’t it? But I thought it was good,” remarked William Mosby, Vega’s owner-wine maker.

Mosby previewed the wines with Massimiliano Muller, chef-owner of the new Massimi Ristorante in Solvang, where the Vega dinner took place. Both rejected a sweeter Gewurztraminer as accompaniment to the dessert in favor of the dry, Alsatian-style wine, which has a residual sugar content of only 0.3 %.

Muller, who was born near Rome, said the wine reminded him of the fruity, dry Gewurztraminers of northern Italy. He also liked the match, although some diners felt the dessert blotted out the Gewurztraminer. Palates are different, Muller observed philosophically.

The Vega dinner began outdoors on the restaurant terrace with the 1986 Pineau, a Pinot Noir blush wine, as an aperitif. For appetizers there were canape-size potato skins and baby pizzas of French bread topped with tomato sauce, ham and mozzarella cheese. The potato skins were marinated with extra-virgin olive oil, rosemary and garlic, then broiled and topped with sour cream and red and black caviar.

Guests moved indoors for the first course: little pasta pockets called agnolotti, which were stuffed with shrimp, basil, rosemary and Parmesan cheese. Delicate in flavor, the agnolotti were lightly coated with lemon sauce and topped with fresh basil. The slight acidity of the sauce countered by the sweetness of the basil went well with the wine--Vega’s 1984 Chardonnay.

Then came portions of veal loin stuffed with artichoke hearts that had been cooked with extra-virgin olive oil and mint. The veal rolls were sauteed in clarified butter, finished with veal stock and served with strips of baby vegetables that had been cooked in clarified butter with thyme.

“We needed something smooth with this dish,” Muller said. “It could have gone with a rich white or a smooth red.” The decision was to serve the Vega 1984 Pinot Noir, which Mosby termed Burgundian in style.

After the veal came a salad of radicchio , oak leaf and butter lettuce with a helping of Gorgonzola cheese, followed by the controversial dessert.

Winery Open Houses

The day after the vintners’ festival is traditionally devoted to winery open houses. One of these presented a teaming of wine and food unique to California. The wine was a dry-styled blush, Au Bon Climat’s 1985 Pinot Noir Chardonnay. The food was Thai-Burmese.

Arranged around a makeshift buffet inside the winery were pots of chicken cooked in coconut milk with basil and mint; beef panang with peanuts, green peppers and roasted red curry paste; mild and spicy squid salads; Burmese potato salad; Thai cucumber salad; steamed rice, and Chinese noodles seasoned with sesame oil, cinnamon, soybean condiment and homemade Chardonnay vinegar.

The dishes were prepared by Au Bon Climat wine makers Jim Clendenen and Adam Tolmach and their wives, all of whom have traveled recently in Southeast Asia. In addition, Qupe wine maker Lindquist, who barbecues each year for the Au Bon Climat parties, grilled pork satay and spooned out peanut sauce from a large pot on the barbecue.

Dry, high-acid blush wines such as the Pinot Noir Chardonnay are ideal with food that “has heat and interesting flavors,” Clendenen pointed out. “The wine doesn’t disappear in the mouth.” In his experience, assertive Mexican and Asian dishes bring out strawberry flavors and richness in the wine and cause it to “sweeten in the mouth.”

The vintners’ festival itself provides ample opportunity for informal matching of wine and food. This year’s event, held at the Flag Is Up Farms at Solvang, offered such dishes as scallop and monkfish ceviche, grilled swordfish kebabs, duck pate, lamb fajitas and grilled quail with morel sauce, produced by restaurants in the region.

Demand for tickets was so great that, for the first time, a second festival has been scheduled for the same year. That event will take place Oct. 24, and is already sold out. The special events surrounding the festival are open to the public. However, advance reservations are necessary for the wine maker dinners and for some of the open houses. For further information, contact the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Assn., P.O. Box WINE, Santa Ynez, Calif. 93460. At far left, Sauvignon Blanc accompanies gravlax at a dinner featuring Gainey Vineyard wines. Above, wine maker Rick Longoria with chef Scott Douglass. At left, hosts Daniel and Robin Gainey, in center, talk to dinner guests.