Dr Vino’s wine blog

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Even though we encountered something similar previously in this series of impossible food wine pairings, site reader Andy from Napa clearly has given this some thought. So we should too! To his email:

Hey Dr. Vino, I have what may be a real stumper – and one I’d love some help with. I’ve got two kids – 8 and 5 – and every Wednesday night at our house is “backward night” – we have breakfast for dinner. A very, very, very popular night with the kids. The menu is usually pancakes, which we whip up from scratch, and breakfast sausages. Added to that, we often put peanut butter AND syrup on the pancakes. All of this goes fine with milk, but, of course for me it’s evening, when my thoughts turn to wine. Sadly, I’ve not yet found a good pairing.

I really would love to know if there’s an actual wine that works. It would have to be something that goes with the nutty flavors of the pancakes (I tend to throw in some sunflower seeds or some toasted flax seeds — you know, sneak in a little healthy stuff when the kids aren’t looking!). Given that milk works so well, I’m tempted to think that a wine with some lactic acid might work — like a white that’s gone through some serious malolactic?

I guess with the sunflower seeds, it’s a safe bet Andy doesn’t serve pancakes and sausage on a stick!

Last week I was chatting with a food writer who was all about the soft shell crab. Then I was cleaning up over the holiday weekend and intercepted Saveur on its way to the recycling bin: “American Crab: A celebration of our favorite spring catch” read the cover. Crabs, they’re everywhere! Perhaps even on your plate.

Since we are now unofficially in summer, when blockbuster movies turn our brains to mush, I thought I’d give you an easy one for our “impossible” foods series: which wine would you pair with softshell (blue) crabs?

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Why does so much food writing neglect wine? A lot of restaurant reviewers gladly discuss the decor but don’t discuss the wine program even though wine can easily account for a third or more of the diners’ final bill. Most food blogs don’t look to include a discussion about wine either even when they are writing for home cooks who can escape the exorbitant mark-ups of wine in restaurants. Many wine blogs, by contrast, have shifted the discussion about wine away from simply tasting notes of berries and leather and the concomitant scores to talk about pairing food and wine. Why no wine love from the foodies?

I put the question to Ed Levine who runs the food juggernaut SeriousEats.com. Ed is friends with such wine luminaries as Josh Wesson of Best Cellars and Daniel Johnnes of Daniel Boulud’s restaurants who have poured him many great wines, trying to convert him to wine’s pleasures. To no avail. With good humor, Ed told me “I’ve never had a wine that takes food to the next level. I’ve never had a wine that impresses me like a great hamburger.” He also cited cutting wine as a good way to cut calories.

While Ed just doesn’t like wine, which is fair enough, he suggested that other food writers might be intimidated by it. That may be true since there are a lot of details about wine, from the producer name, to the vintage, to the grapes and where they were grown. But that shouldn’t stop an thumbs up or thumbs down for a certain wine and why it did or didn’t work with a certain dish. A lot of food writers are all too happy to have an opinion about a hamburger and if they don’t like it, then it’s a bad hamburger. By contrast, if they don’t like a wine, I fear they think it reflects badly on them as if they should know more about it. That’s too bad.

At least food writers aren’t alone: wine is woefully underrepresented in food TV shows, and, as we’ve discussed before, it’s not likely to change on the Food Network. How about the Travel Channel? When Tony Bourdain advises his viewers about which wine goes with still-beating snake heart, then we’ll know a page has been turned in the way foodies think about wine.

What makes food writers neglect the cork in favor of the fork: a lack of interest? Price? Intimidation/lack of confidence? Rampant teetotalerism?

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SIPPED: Sauternes
Chicago’s foie gras ban has been repealed in a 37 - 6 vote by the City Council, overturning the 48 - 1 vote that put the ban into effect two years ago. The prices of Sauternes, the unctuous sweet wine often served as an accompaniment, just went up an additional ten percent. [Sun Times, thanks Stephen!]

SIPPED: Cork back for an encork
When a member of the Culinary Institute of American saw my cork iPhone case in February, she exclaimed that it would be the perfect product for recycling their corks! But apparently someone had other plans as the 900 corks pulled there a day will now be recycled in a new program called ReCORK America, sponsored by a cork producer to underscore the “natural” qualities of cork. But what is the carbon footprint of sending all that cork into be recycled into floor tile (and sidebars for wine blogs). Wouldn’t the CIA be better reusing them as festive holiday wreaths–or those iPhone covers?!?

SPIT: Critter labels
On the heels of our worst wine label contest comes more advice, this time from Wines & Vines. One item: a label designer Down Under has a “no critters” policy after seeing the kangaroo reinvented some “50,000 times.” [Wines & Vines] Related: ”

SPIT: Brunello di Montalcino
Not content with the FAA’s Global War On Toiletries, US federal authorities are now turning their eyes on another liquid: Brunello di Montalcino! A recent scandal has revealed blending of grapes other than sangiovese, the only one permissible under the local DOC rules in the wine. Now, as a result, the feds are threatening to block US imports of the pricey Italian wine as of June 9. “Part of our mandate is to make sure all labels are truthful, accurate and not misleading to the American consumer,’’ Mr. Resnick of the US Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau told Eric Asimov. Um, OK, how about starting with Korbel “California Champagne”? [NYT]

SPIT: asparagus in December
In a piece that, oddly, has not received much attention here in the US of A, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay–known for his high-end restaurants in several countries as well as cursing like, well, a chef–lays into out-of season like nobody’s bidness calling for it to be outlawed in the UK. While absolutely laudable in principal, the legislative angle may be the wrong way to achieve this policy goal. And let’s hope eating local in his case doesn’t mean eating any more horse! [BBC]

SIPPED: Wine into water
Wine & Spirits magazine will be holding two public tastings in Los Angeles and Seattle that sound like fun with good people and good wines. Since I gave up bottled water for thirty days and lived to tell the tale, I like the secondary cause too: $5 of each ticket will go to local water conservation organizations. [Wine & Spirits Hotpicks]
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Site reader Sal sends in this query: “Can I submit an impossible food/wine pairing? How about Kim Chi? We’ve had it with Soju and it’s great but what if you like still wine (especially red)? Is a Kim Chi/wine pairing possible?”

Excellent question! Hit the comments with your thoughts. And in honor of Stephen Colbert’s rivalry with Korean pop sensation Rain to become the TIME most influential person of the year, as well as getting in the mood for an impossible food wine pairing, check out this hysterical video of Stephen singing in Korean.

Cinco de Mayo is just around the corner. Can we wine lovers come up with a wine pairing that will have people put down their margaritas and Coronas for a glass of wine? Probably not. But which wine would you pair with: burritos! Let us know whether you are talking about a beef, chicken or bean with your suggestion. Or is it…impossible?

Related: “Impossible food-wine pairing: chips and salsa!”
“Impossible food-wine pairing: breakfast burrito!”
(image; and yes, that was the best burrito photo I could find.)

I poured a Loire cab franc at an event recently and suggested that it would go well with fatty food, some roasted chicken perhaps. Someone asked, “How bout fries?”

I’d never thought about pairing wine with fries! So, I ask you, is it … impossible?!? Hit the comments with your suggestions! And please note whether your wine suggestion considers either ketchup or mustard–or (UPDATE, for European readers) mayo!

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SPIT: Food and wine gone awry
Cabernet and wedding cake, Cabernet and mac n cheese, pulled pork and Burgundy - great comments, and they’re yours! Check out all of the great and wonderful food pairings that knocked your world.

SPIT: the hippocampus!
Wine drinkers have a 10 percent smaller hippocampus than those who drink spirits or beer, researchers say! But I thought “Red wine antioxidants protect hippocampal neurons against ethanol-induced damage“! Ugh, my brain hurts.

SPIT: Chinese wine!
“Millions of Chinese will be disappointed by their first taste of wine” is Jancis Robinson’s assessment of home-grown wines in China. Reporting on a recent trip, she, too, was “disappointed” by the “chemical and occasionally rotten odours” in the wines and general lack of progress with the industry over the past five years. [FT]

SIPPED: Holy wine
In Manchester they may go for Fairtrade wine, but Craig Heffley and Seth Gross of Wine Authorities, a wine retailer in Durham, NC, have another goal in mind for the Duke Chapel: tasty. They plan to start selling a 3L bag-in-box next summer for use in the Eucharist. [Durham News]

SPIT: drinking wine
“The 2006 Insolia from Feudo Principi di Butera…can be pleasurably inhaled for minutes.” Going easy on the hippocampus, was he? [NYT]

SIPPED: understatement
Talk about an impossible food wine pairing! Wine critic and blogger Peter Liem visits a sake festival in Japan and eats live shrimp: “My first two passed complacently, but a third, a female full of salty-sweet roe, twitched a little as I decapitated her with my fingers.” What’s his title for this juicy posting? “Niigata Prefecture.” Tony Bourdain, your job is safe–for now!–until Peter recruits a headline writer from Gawker… [peterliem]

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The good people over at Forbes have assembled a pageview-baiting slide show with some top chefs and foods and wines that made them sing. Not literally, but you get the idea.

So let’s help them out with some content for their next slide show: what’s a particularly memorable food-wine pairing that you thought might work out but went awry, perhaps horrendously? While wine can no doubt conquer any culinary terrain as we have seen in our “impossible food-wine pairings,” there are still some clunkers that knock your world rather than rock it. Take, for example, zinfandel and grilled eggplant, which I paired one day only to the effect of unleashing tannin-on-tannin warfare in my mouth.

Hit the comments with your clunkers and you will be entered into a random drawing to win a prize: a new copy of the comprehensive food pairing book What to Drink with What You Eat, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg.

Post your comment by Monday to qualify, check back here on Tuesday to see if you were the winner.

From a reader:

So we went nuts and had breakfast for dinner. Poached eggs for the wife, fried eggs for me. Hash browns, turkey bacon. A little tomatillo salsa for me, on the eggs.

Let’s rule out champagne or mimosas. What wine do you have with breakfast, when you’re not eating it in the a.m.?

It’s an interesting question. But I find this pairing to be driven more by what’s on the plate than by the time of day. So why rule out Champagne? It might just make this…possible! Hit the comments with your thoughts!

Image: istockphoto with permission