The sommelier and wine educator, Evan Goldstein, calls them the 'Just Say No' foods: artichokes, asparagus, eggs and chiles. Don't
drink wine when you eat them, he cites the conventional wisdom; they don't make for partners in pleasure.
So true.
Artichokes contain a unique organic acid, cynarin, which stimulates the sweetness receptors in the taste buds. Cynarin makes
everything, even water, taste sweeter for a short time. As a consequence, eating an artichoke may make some wines—say, an
American chardonnay with even a bit of residual sugar—taste ever so sweet and cloyingly so.
For its part, asparagus is a powerful, bittersweet taste. It is one of the edible plants highest in both phosphorus and mercaptan.
After you eat asparagus—can we be frank here?—these chemicals remind you that you did eat them during the next two or three
visits to the potty. The phosphorus and mercaptan also interact to corrupt the good taste of wine.
Eggs, especially egg yolk, coat the mouth in a resolute way. It isn't that eggs 'spoil' wine. They simply prevent it from being tasted.
And chile heat derives from capsaicin, a powerful alkaloid in the seeds and veins of chile peppers. Capsaicin numbs the palate
(which is why some of us adore it) and makes it difficult to appreciate whatever else goes into the mouth along with it, wine included.
Capsaicin is soluble in alcohol but insoluble in water, which is why drinking water won't work to alleviate the burning. So, wine's
alcohol actually helps speed up the palate's recovery from chile heat. However, as I have found when tasting together both wine and
chiles, that same alcohol in wine also disperses the chile heat and, so, intensifies it for a short while.
So we abrogate artichokes, asparagus, eggs and chile. Nonetheless, we still want to eat them—and drink wine with them.
After all, these foods (with the exception of too many eggs) are very beneficent. And, as we have discovered, so is wine.
To these unruly four, you may add other wine-troublesome foods such as Brussels sprouts and spinach (they can make wine
taste metallic); milk, yogurt and ice cream (like eggs, their proteins coat the palate); very oily or highly smoked fish (they overpower
many wines); and highly acidic foods such as some vinaigrettes or pickles, or citrus, tomatoes or mustard (they ruin low-acid wines—
and there are plenty of those).
Does it matter, with wine and food combinations, whether we're drinking the wine with the food in the mouth? Or taking the wine,
alone, as sip after the food's been chewed?
It's an interesting question for me, because some of the strong players in the match we call food-and-wine are those that scrub the
palate clean, getting it ready for the next taste (or sensation of fat, or chile heat or any such thing).
That's to say that some of the better food and wine matches are a ying and yang, here the wine, then the food, and then again.
The pleasure comes from the way these two, well, feed off each other and, in a sense, need each other.
On the other hand, mooshing it all up together is sometimes very pleasurable, too, mixing the wine and food in the mouth, flavors
piling on flavors. That seems particularly true with red wines, perhaps because they are greater flavor carriers than whites. (While it is
certainly true that white wines are better 'palate cleansers.')
Finally, a word about the kinds of wines I found most successful with Just Say No foods: white, low alcohol, high acidity, often with
low flavor profiles.
What often disturbs me about wine and food matching is the way people pooh-pooh some sorts of wines saying, for instance, that
Italian white wines just don't rival California chardonnays.
These people prefer wines that always come with corks in their necks, or chardonnays with buckets of oomph (and wood and
alcohol and gold medals), or wines with names which their friends also recognize. Nothing really too wrong with all that. It just misses
wine's point.
Most wine, you know, isn't even put into a bottle with a cork. People are always amazed to learn this, but a good 95%-98% of the
wine made each year on the globe is consumed before the next harvest. Putting wine in a bottle with a cork and saving it until it's a
year or two older is really a very odd thing to do.
Most people who drink wine, drink it every day with meals. They aren't looking for a 'big' wine, or one with medals and prizes, or
one to put away until it appreciates in value.
And that's why Italian white wines aren't anything at all like American chardonnays: They don't fill the same role. By and large, an
American chardonnay is supposed to be a powerhouse, meant to stand up in the glass and win gold medals at wine competitions.
Italian white wines, by and large, couldn't care less about the gilding. They're light; high in crispness; low in alcohol; and abundantly
fresh. They're meant for food—and for food in a special way.
Do you know how a painter prepares a canvas by applying gesso before any color? The reason? So that when the colors are laid
on the canvas, they'll show up better. Gesso is a necessary, though unseen (perhaps unappreciated), background to a good painting.
In the same way, a good Italian white wine lays back and lets the flavors and textures of a meal play on top of it. It's a necessary
background and, without it, the food just wouldn't taste as good.
An American chardonnay, on the other hand, is generally like a big, rude doofus at the table, intruding on the food's flavors rather
than helping them flourish.
That's why winner wines for Just Say No foods are wines such as Italian, Portuguese, German and Spanish whites. As humble as
they are, they work.
