Acid With Acid

[Randy Caparoso]

I'm glad we're having this conversation because at least it clarifies much of what I try to contribute to the Wine Board. Please allow me to go further.

As you know, I'm coming off 25 years (just recently retired) in the restaurant business, 23 of that spent training entire restaurant staffs -- in the beginning, mostly about just wine, and as the years went by, more and more about how wine works in the context of food.

The standard method of teaching food/wine affinities is by taking five or six dishes and matching each one with five or six wines. The approach is not touchy-feely, but disciplined -- everyone is forced to break down the components of not only each wine (body, acidity, sweetness, tannin, etc.), but also the components of each dish (butter in the sauce, fat in the meat, char from the grill, bitterness from the sprouts, sweetness from fruit, etc.). It is a process of seeing how the components mix and match (i.e. similarity/contrast, positive/negative, etc.).

What always emerges is the discovery that each dish can be enhanced by more than one wine, for similar or different reasons. The importance of this is that servers can go out and recommend a single wine (and chefs can confidently prepare dishes) knowing that it CAN go with multiple dishes -- which is precisely what happens in every fine restaurant, at every table on any given night. People order just one or two wines to go with five, six or more dishes.

To you, this may sound like I'm teaching conservatism, but to me it's just dealing with reality. The same reality you found with your food-versatile Finger Lakes Riesling.

Naturally, over the years, my wine lists became known for its great variety of choices outside the box -- the same thing you actively engender -- which was done in an effort to give my staffs as much "ammunition" as possible when making their learned wine recommendations.

If anything, my wine lists have been criticized by guests, owners, and colleagues for being too esoteric. But in reality, I've always endeavored to strike a balance between the adventurous and familiar choices. Although I've always enjoy sharing new and different things, I've always tried to avoid shunning the "same ol'-same ol'," looking upon that as nothing more than reverse snobbery. And besides, much of what used to be weird and esoteric has become all too ubiquitous today -- an evolutionary process that will go on and on. My attitude is simply that the gastronomic value of a single wine doesn't really change, whether it's adventurous or all-too-familiar. What changes is our attitude.

And the only real danger is when our attitude becomes entrenched into a single mindset, whether it's "familiar is bad" or "adventuous is too much trouble."