I am one of these foodies. I don’t believe myself to have an extraordinarily sophisticated palate by any means, but I’ve spent more than thirty years eating a wide variety of things around the world and educating myself via extensive reading and by talking to chefs and artisanal producers. What I know, I have learned by experience, and I think I know a fair bit.
Here’s how that manifests, with a couple of real-world examples from my own life:
I do wine-region visits pretty regularly, spending four or five days in a hot spot and hitting seven to ten wineries each day, touring and tasting. Usually, these tastings offer a handful of what the winery considers their best products — here’s our Pinot noir, and our Merlot, and our Cabernet Franc, or whatever. My favorite tasting option, though, is pretty hard to find, for a variety of reasons — the “vertical flight.” In a vertical, by contrast with the norm, you’re trying a single type of wine across several years: “here is our Cabernet Sauvignon in the 1999 vintage, and the 2001 vintage, and the 2004 vintage,” etc.
Many years ago, during a Napa visit, I went into a winery and saw they were offering a vertical. They were a small producer, with their own vineyards, making wine exclusively with their own grapes. (It’s common for winemakers to supplement the grapes they grow themselves with additional fruit bought from third-party suppliers.) So this was a rare chance at a truly controlled experiment — the same varietal, grown on the same land, under the supervision of the same winemaker, with the only major variable being the year of production. This means you’re directly tasting the weather and the time in the bottle.
I sipped through the flight of five, and noticed right away that the fourth was very different from the others. Its flavors were muted, with its various aromatic qualities blurring together strangely instead of being distinct from one another, as in the others. I noted this to the staffers helping me, and they said they’d had a combination of heavier rains and a problem with the drainage system that year, and that the vineyard was briefly flooded as a result. They fixed it pretty fast, and didn’t think it had done that much damage, which is why they went ahead and produced the vintage.
I don’t know if I would have noticed the blurriness outside the context of a vertical, but with all the wines right next to each other like that, the difference was pretty striking.
Another story:
On a visit to Paris a few years ago, I managed to secure a table at a hot, up-and-coming restaurant. (They have since been awarded a Michelin star.) As the server handed us our menus, he asked if we would like to start with a glass of something. I advised that my wife would have Champagne, and I would be interested in their wine pairings (where they choose something appropriate to accompany each course). Very good, he said.
A few moments later, the sommelier arrived. He said, we have our standard pairing menu, but we have a large cellar, so if you’d like to see the proposed list, we can make adjustments according to your preferences. I said, that won’t be necessary, I’m sure you’ve made your pairings for good reasons, but if it matters, I prefer interesting accompaniments over obvious and conventional. After a brief pause, he smiled, and said, very good.
A couple of minutes later, the server brought two tall flutes with bubbly. Mine was slightly paler in color than my wife’s, so I knew I’d gotten something different. I tasted both; mine had a somewhat subdued profile compared to hers. Then, after another minute, we got the first course.
It was asparagus, prepared several different ways. Asparagus presents a challenge for wine matching; the wrong combination can create an unpleasant metallic flavor. Still, it’s been a known issue for a long time, and there are some rules of thumb one can follow depending on how it’s been cooked. In this case, though, putting several different preparations on one plate makes the challenge even more difficult. I tasted my wine with the food, and found an interesting grassiness that complemented the vegetable beautifully.
The sommelier returned: how do you like the wine? It’s an excellent pairing, I responded; there’s an surprising fresh-herb note that really supports the asparagus. Also, it’s not Champagne, right? The sommelier smiled, and said, what do you think it is? I tasted again, and said, it’s bright and crisp, a bit of mineral, and the aroma of fresh cut grass makes me think Loire Valley. Is it one of their Crémants?
A nod and a smile: very good. I couldn’t be any more specific than that, but I still felt pretty good about it. He shows me the bottle, and I take a note.
From that point forward, it became a game. He’d bring me the next glass, and I’d taste it; then the server would bring the next course, and I’d taste them together; and the sommelier would return and ask for my reaction. I did well enough identifying his picks, at least generally (“definitely a Burgundy, young, I’m gonna say three years in the bottle”), that he started going off-reservation. For a late fish course, he brought a cute little half-sized brandy snifter with a very slightly hued clear liquid that made me think of grappa, but when I tasted it, I instantly recognized it as a junmai-style sake. He raised his eyebrows on that one when I named it: I think he thought he was going to catch me off guard, not least because it’s pretty unusual for a French restaurant even to have sake in the cellar. But the taste and texture are unmistakable.
He finally really got me on the last wine, with the dessert course. I absolutely could not place it, at all. It was definitely a dessert wine, thick and sweet, but it didn’t have any of the characteristics you associate with late-harvest, ice-wine, or botrytis methods. I told him I didn’t have a good guess, but I took a couple of half-hearted pokes in those directions. Finally, he triumphantly told me it was a pear wine (!) made in very small batches as a hobby by a winemaker friend of the chef.
I told him, truthfully, that I would never have guessed that, and I thanked him for a memorable finish to the evening. Because whatever small annoyance I may have felt at this very unfair challenge, pulling something from so far out of left field, was outweighed by the compliment of his having poured me a sample from what must have been one of the restaurant’s own private bottles, rarely offered to customers, if ever.
Anyway, this has gotten a lot longer than I had planned or anticipated. But I really do love this stuff, and I will enthusiastically wave away any suggestion that there’s nothing but pretension in it. Sure, one can take it too far, no question, but that doesn’t mean the whole field of experience can be dismissed outright.
