Food-wine match

[Randy Caparoso]

I'm sure that that most of our leading food and wine commentators these days lead this double life. I'm talking about folks like David Rosengarten, Joshua Wesson, Harvey Steiman, Eleanor & Ray Heald, and Decanter's Fiona Beckett, among others. I like to read them because I believe that they evaluate, and report on, food and wine matches more or less objectively in spite of their personal predilections. No one, of course, can be 100% objective on matters of taste.

Obviously, I speak a lot from years of personal experience. These days, however, many of my observations are based upon interactions with my restaurant guests (we run tons of multi-course/wine tasting menus) as well as with my staffs.

With my staffs (both servers and chefs), for instance, we actually go through multi-level wine and food seminars on a regular basis (I just returned from 9 days of it in Newport Beach and Scottsdale). We all try to taste, say, five different wines with each dish (as much as five dishes per seminar) and try to discover how they work together just as our guests would. Great variety of responses is pretty much par for the course. But in the end, I would say that we usually come up with a few broad as well as specific points of consensus as to how things work in context with others.

In short, what I'm usually sharing on the Wine Board is often a direct result of such findings. Hope this explains.