The Worst Enemy of Fine Wines: Food

Once again I am faced with a familiar, yet completely unnecessary problem.I have been invited to Stockholm by a friend to taste all the vintages of Salon from 1959 onwards.It will undoubtedly be a fine and memorable oenological event.After the tasting we will enjoy an eight-course dinner for which each guest must bring one bottle of fine wine. A well-known concept which always works. Or does it?

 The eight-course dinner will naturally be designed and prepared by a Michelin-rated chef.In order to tailor the menu to the wines brought by the guests, the organiser of the event would like to know in advance what wines to expect.A nice thought, but one that in practice is pointless and a nightmare for the chef.The fact that there are fifteen guests at dinner means that each person will only have enough wine at the bottom of his or her large Riedel Master Class glass to taste and then have a tiny drop with dinner. That is actually for the best, because in my opinion no rare, mature fine wine needs or wants to be accompanied by food.I feel that the best way to ruin the experience of either a fine wine or a gourmet dish is to combine them.

I have organised hundreds of tastings of top wines and been invited to many more similar events.Not once, in my experience, has a Château Latour 1961 or a Romanée-Conti 1985 been improved by being served with food, even if the food is of a similar standard. By the same token, no dish byRené Redzepi of Noma or Thomas Keller of The French Laundry has tasted better when paired with such wines. Quite the opposite.

I have met and spoken with numerous top winemakers about their wines and production philosophies, and not one of them has said that they make wine to be enjoyed with food. It is not even in their minds.The thought that some dish might improve the taste of their wines is completely foreign and incomprehensible to them.After all, they work hard and do their best in collaboration with Mother Nature to ensure their wines are as balanced and drinkable as possible by themselves.None of them will say that their wines would benefit from or need to have food by their side. And why should they?

The same applies to the proud and talented head chefs of the world’s top restaurants.Most of them do not even think about wines when planning and composing a menu.They work, sometimes to the early morning hours, to create and painstakingly prepare dishes that are in themselves works of art, perfectly balanced in taste.When asked, none of them will say that even the best wines would improve the delicate and complex flavour of the dish. On the contrary, it will often destroy it.

I do not envy the task of the sommelier, because in a way it is impossible.At most, I think they can aim to salvage a poor dinner.I do not know any head chef who is best friends with his own restaurant’s sommelier.

I feel that combining top wines with gourmet food is at best a compromise.If none of the creators of top wines or fine dishes believe that either product can be improved through such a combination, then why is it done daily around the world?Why ruin a dish created and meticulously prepared by the talented René Redzepi with a fine Latour 1961, which will only steal the limelight?

Dinner in a three-star Michelin restaurant accompanied by the best Latour vintages is a lovely and beautiful idea, but does not go beyond that.In practice putting the two together is the best way to ensure you don’t get value for your money.

Dinner at Noma or any other comparable restaurant is a fantastic experience when you focus on enjoying what the establishment does best: the delicate flavours and visual mastery of the food. Similarly, a Latour 1961 is at its best enjoyed by itself.

Of course, there is one element which will significantly improve both experiences: good company.Dinner at Noma with interesting conversation partners or a Latour 1961 enjoyed with great friends are perfect, unforgettable experiences.

So I know the solution to my problem.I will take a bottle of pure Finnish spring water to Stockholm.The chef is bound to approve, but what will the other guests think when I set down my water bottle alongside their fourteen sublime wines?

Who is your wine critic?

Many of the choices that we make in life are influenced by critics. These loved and loathed experts tell us which London restaurant is now serving the best Anjou pigeon, why you just have to see the minimalist exhibition at the MoMA, whether it is worth catching Amy at the cinema…

However, would you choose to go to a movie that was recommended by a critic who spends most of his day watching music videos and reality TV and has not yet seen the masterworks of Fellini, Truffaut, or Tarkovsky? Moreover, one who has also never seen the performances by Robert de Niro as Taxi Driver, Holly Hunter in The Piano, or Chaplin in Modern Times.

On the other hand, perhaps you would take your partner out for a birthday celebration at a restaurant recommended by a critic who has spent his time in fast food joints and eating ready-made meals, but has not experienced the atmosphere of the French Laundry, El Bulli, or perhaps the Fat Duck. Or perhaps who has never sampled the magical creations of Gordon Ramsay, Alain Ducasse, or Wolfgang Puck.

Probably not.

To make a worthwhile, credible judgment, the critic at least needs to know what he is judging and possess extensive knowledge of the subject.

Nevertheless, most of us follow the advice of those wine critics who mainly spend their time trying out cheap, nondescript wine and young, raw bottlings. Many such critics have never tasted the perfection of a 1947 Cheval Blanc, savoured the sheer elegance of a 1928 vintage Krug champagne, or experienced the sublime balance of a 1962 Vega Sicilia. Or perhaps who have never tried the best vintages of Jean-Claude Berrouet, Henri Jayer, or André Noblet. What if he or she has never tasted the world's best wines when they are at their peak? What then is his or her evaluation based on?

Wine critics often seem to try to hide their lack of expertise and experience behind glib remarks about the product, often at its own expense. The judgment made is simply the critic's opinion, and has little to do with the product's real essence.

Wine culture these days is for the mass market, the same way that cinema is. Efficient production machinery churns out products for the general public from the same old and often regrettably indifferent sources. Amid all of this greyness and in this atmosphere of paucity, the wine critic’s role is to act as a ‘quality’ filter between wines and consumers. The critic analyses the wine, gives their opinion, and thus influences their thirsty – and very busy – clients.

Although critics quite rightly think that they should cater to their readers, their reviews more often than not affect those who make a living from wine. A negative, inexpert, or inappropriate judgment can have repercussions, for example, for the sales of an individual wine, its appearance in shops, investment in its advertising, and the unwillingness of a merchant to bring a new vintage onto the market or of a restaurant to put it on the wine list. On the other hand, one should not make too much of this, as a positive criticism cannot rescue a wine either, if it simply does not deserve the praise and high scores that it receives.

The wine critic's most important tool is experience. Without extensive personal experience, it is impossible to rate a wine or explain the way that it relates to other wines. A good wine critic examines the wine from different angles and considers its qualities and significance in its broader cultural context and against its background as a product. The wine engrosses them, but at the same time, they keep a distance from it. They are also required to distinguish between the best and mediocre, and to take the trouble to provide a detailed explanation of their opinion of the wine. Such an expert discovers each wine's personality and characteristics and acknowledges its uniqueness. Furthermore, more than anything else, a good wine critic is humble and all too aware of the power that they wield.

If your wine critic matches these criteria, you can go off to the wine store and confidently serve what it has to offer to your friends at dinner. As long as you remember that the most important critic is to be found within yourself. That one is always right, even when your very own official wine critic thinks otherwise.

NEXT AFTER GOD!

Monkton—a town without a centre or a bank—is a quietly inconspicuous place in a remote corner of America’s Midwest. No one here is in any hurry to go anywhere, and there are hardly hordes of drivers exiting the motorway that bypasses the town all keen to get here. The days go by like they always have, and people seem to want to keep it that way.

On the outskirts of the town stands a solid but normal-looking two-storey white house in a quiet avenue. Its owner’s dogs have their own demarcated area in the well-tended garden. Every morning before 8, on at least six days a week, a large, serene-looking man walks down the stairs from the bedroom to the kitchen for breakfast. After breakfast, this 61 year old man, who occasionally grumbles about his back though on the whole is happy with his state of health, goes up to his work room, whose tile floor his two dogs spend most of their time on snoozing and playing. On the table is the day’s work, all set out the previous evening: 32 bottles of wine and as many wine glasses. Next to the bottles is a large silver spittoon, in which, as the day goes on, the contents of the various bottles will end up.

The man calmly begins work and pours a few centilitres of liquid from the first bottle, which is in a cloth bag to conceal its name. He glances at the colour of the wine and grunts approvingly at its dark, almost black, colour. He vigorously swirls the wine in the glass, unhurriedly raises it to his mouth and sticks his very valuable nose (it is insured for a million dollars!) deep inside. He sniffs earnestly at the wine for quite some time. The aromas the wine releases immediately attack his experienced olfactory receptors, as if their very existence were under threat. At the same time, thousands of memory traces awaken in his brain and a split second later his olfactory senses are at work analysing the new fragrance and comparing it to all those he has encountered before. Conclusions are reached. They are transmitted along the neural pathways leading to the fingers that hold the pencil he uses to record his experience in written form.

           Next, he moves the glass away from his nose and down to his lips, which he opens slightly, and then pours a tiny quantity of the wine into his mouth, at the same time taking a short breath of air. The taste buds in his mouth and on his tongue slowly register the tastes of the wine’s different elements. Gone are the days when they awaited this moment anxiously and excitedly, when their owner made them work hard and insisted on complete success. Now they proudly, almost routinely, though always professionally, conduct an analysis of the wine, sorting out its various elements and sending the information up to the brain for a final synopsis. Having swilled the wine round inside his mouth for a moment, the man spits it out and once again scribbles a few sentences down on a piece of paper. Then he repeats the entire tasting ritual over again to confirm his opinions and makes a few final notes.

The notes normally consist of fewer than 10 sentences and one number. This number, generally made up of two numerals, is one of the world’s most potent combination of figures. It has the power to decide the lives of countless numbers of people, and can make them rich or poor. This two-digit number is able to persuade thousands of people to pay top prices for wines around the world.

This image of the start of the working day for Mr Robert Parker in his home town is purely a figment of my imagination. But the fact that he is the world’s most highly regarded wine critic is not. The two-digit, at best three-digit, rating he gives wines acts as a sort of eleventh Commandment for wine producers, traders and consumers. But why should the opinion of this normal, middle-aged American living in the backwoods be so important that it frequently influences my drinking and spending habits and those of millions of other wine lovers? Why do we not simply trust in our own sense of taste and the size of our wallets? Perhaps it is because Mr Parker is always right.

Many of his colleagues over the years have tried to challenge Robert Parker’s absolute rule and question his abilities. The attacks on him in recent years, particularly from British wine critics, are understandable but in vain. To the ordinary wine consumer they are no more than meaningless bickering between a small and very complacent bunch of people and which seems totally to ignore the fact that no one sitting in their Ivory Tower can tell you or me why their opinions should be any more reliable than Mr Parker’s.

Whoever is right is up to the consumers and their taste buds to decide, and they have chosen Mr Parker.

I realise that the opinions of critics also often guide my choices in areas like the cinema and art exhibitions. Almost as often I realise I am later amazed at the words of praise by the critics who persuaded me to go. But when I let Mr Parker inform my choices, I almost always realise afterwards that I am delighted—the wine is excellent. This is the case too with most of my friends.

Of course there are a lot of wine lovers who care little for what Robert Parker has to say. They evidently trust in their own sense of taste and nobody else’s. That is fine. Because the fact is that, although the judgments that critics make about wine are helpful when it comes to its quality and present condition, they do not say what the wine tastes and feels like in your mouth. Only you can say that, no one else. I urge all my readers bravely to trust in their own sense of taste and buy wines that the world’s best critic, you yourself, has awarded the complete 100 points to. If, however, sometimes you are not so sure, there is always Mr Parker to ask. After God, that is.