The ‘Elevated Experience‘ — or how to forever enhance your food and wine life.
Let’s begin this story with a disaster.
In the summer of 1989, the cast and crew of what would become the Oscar-winning movie ‘Glory’ were in Savannah, Georgia, filming on location. I was living there, happily waiting tables in an Italian restaurant, trying to regroup after ten years in the music business and also trying to figure out where I was going in life.
I love Savannah. I loved working in that restaurant. I loved hearing stories of adventures from customers who had traveled the world, like so many of the film’s stars had. The crew sort of adopted our little café as their ‘local’ and I struck up a great friendship with the film’s decorator, a charming Californian called Garrett. He was an exuberant character, a food and wine lover and a wonderful storyteller. He loved our arty, quirky little place, and he brought his team there several nights a week. Garrett loved to enjoy himself around friends. I can happily say there were plenty of good times.
Early on, I introduced Garrett to a wine that soon became his favourite, an Australian Chardonnay, hugely popular and quite typical of the genre at the time: a big, woody, rich mouthful of wine.
Our disaster — or ‘train wreck’ as I now call it — happened with a Thai-inspired curry we called ‘chicken gang’ (Gang Gai). It was served as a special feature just one night a week, Mondays, as a nod to the company’s executive chef who was from Bangkok. Italian café or not, there was a soupçon of Thailand on the menu on Mondays. Gerald, our in-house chef in Savannah, loved different chilli peppers, he grew them, so the heat factor in the curry could rock your world betimes. The Glory crew loved it!
One fateful Monday Garrett was in, enjoying his favourite wine (the aforementioned Chardonnay) and with several dinner companions, ordered the ‘gang’ special. They were having so much fun, and dinner was duly served.
I watched the disbelief and confusion on his face from across the room. This amazing, authentic ‘gang’ with his beloved chardonnay had turned his meal into a lip-curling inferno, a gastronomic disaster. What the heck?!
I went over to him post-haste, in three-alarm rescue mode, ordering a substitute meal on the fly. Whew. All was eventually well table-side BUT the experience was a tipping point.
What was going on? Poor Garrett. He loved the wine and didn’t want to change that, but he really loved the curry too! He was one of my best food-and-wine guys. Thankfully he had spent many nights with us where everything was wonderful, this evening was truly baffling.
Confession.
Did I mention I read chemistry at University? Analytical at that, including Food Science for a bit. Yet I had absolutely no clue what had caused Garret’s dinner to implode. My determination to find out began the next day. The glove was down.
I’ll admit freely there was more than a little self-interest at work in some respects. I adore spicy foods; Thai and Indian particularly. All the spicy, bright, aromatic deliciousness. Finding wine to work with these foods is often a tough call. When I say ‘work’ here, I mean a pairing where the wine isn’t compromised, or doesn’t in any way compromise the enjoyment of the food, as had happened to Garret. They balance.
I headed for the library, planning a note-taking marathon (it was the late 80’s guys, no Evernote yet).
BUT…
There was nothing there. In the library I mean.
There were plenty of coffee-table food books and some technical wine books but a practical guide to Food and Wine together didn’t seem to exist.
I eventually came across the wonderful ‘Red Wine with Fish’ (by Josh Wesson) which I loved then and still do. It was headed in the right direction, but — I still needed more.
By then I was managing the restaurant. I had fifteen waiters to teach about the dangers of big wines and spice, the pitfalls of Chianti and artichokes. There were many bell-ringing, gorgeous pairings we knew well too but it was the train wreck moments that worried the team. And rightly so.
No-one wants to spend $50 on dinner and have it just be ‘meh’ — or worse — when they have wine with it. Is something wrong with the wine, the shrimp, the sauce? I needed to show my guys why some combinations tanked.
I looked more closely at food, the structural elements, not necessarily ‘tastes’, noting interactions with wine and the residual effect; ultimately ‘how much are you enjoying your meal’?
A group of wine and food pals, about six of us, started exploring these notions. We would eat, drink and think together every chance we got. Sometimes we even roped in an amused bystander for opinion! Because a few were in the wine business, ten or twelve open bottles on a table was not unusual. That sure get you noticed in Savannah back then (‘what are you guys doing?’).
It was all around us, this intriguing food and wine maelstrom. But an idea was taking shape, little bit by bit. A scaffolding emerging from the cloud.
Many years later, when I read ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’ by (the awesome) Malcolm Gladwell, I was struck by the following quote: “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” I thought ‘wow, that is a lot of hours’. Then I did some math and another ‘wow’ later realised we had passed that line years ago on the way here.
Back to the beginning. All of this had to be based on chemistry. We might be emotional when we eat and drink because of circumstance and surroundings but we taste, ingest, digest, and metabolise thanks to — chemistry. The really good news? If we figured out the chemistry part and got it right, then it can happen again, and again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Chemistry has no opinions.
So we tasted and spat, and spat some more. We experimented with, and on, friends — restaurateurs, winemakers, my sisters, servers, chefs. We tested. We tasted. We developed a workshop to show people how this worked. We gratefully collaborated with professors of medicine and neuroscience who made sense of our findings.
Then I wrote a book about it.
Someone had to start this, right?
At the end of the day, what you want to eat and drink together is totally your call. There are many schools of thought about food and wine pairing out there. If you’re reading this, you’re probably like a gadzillion others who have been there, done that, possibly still part baffled.
BUT — what if it really can be better? Better for friends, the sisters, for anyone who loves wine and food.
That ‘better’ is what we now call ‘the ZiNG! thing’.
People, food, wine — we are a mélange of chemicals. In moments of food & wine nirvana we are not thinking about science. Heck no! It’s all emotion and thrills, but the experience itself is choreographed by chemistry — and that’s what interests us here. There is complex stuff going on in the tasting experience. Add wine to the mix and those interactions become ever more complex. But we found combinations that work, chemically, and we know how to show you.
ZiNG! is a little bit like yoga. You go to a class to learn poses. And then with practice, you feel a rhythm. You become aware of things you might not have felt before and next thing you know, it’s coming together, you feel good, and you want to do it again. Finding a ZiNG! with your food and wine is very much like that.
You follow your own instinctive response as your guideline.
In a ZiNG! workshop we explain interactions as they happen, like in your yoga class. I could tell you about it all day on paper or screen, but there is no substitute for eating and drinking. Doh, you knew that. There are some simple examples in the book, and we have some feature stories coming to you here soon. (I’m excited for that)
During my time in Savannah, I frequently visited Charleston, as many Savannahians do. There is a particular cluster of homes downtown, an architectural landmark, called Rainbow Row (see above). The houses are stately, gorgeous, and painted the most wonderful colours! Lime green, turquoise, sunflower yellow. I had a eureka moment one day when I realised they were a marvellous analogy to explain the importance of structure in wine and food. The beautiful colours were like flavor descriptors: bright, attractive, memorable.
Now imagine you’re in Charleston, there’s a hurricane coming, and you’re in front of Rainbow Row. You realise you don’t know how the houses are built. Are they made of wood, glass, brick? Most of the time it wouldn’t matter, but if a storm is on the way you could be in real trouble if you wing it. Are you going to choose a safe haven based on its colour or on its construction?
Humans taste through a system that begins in our taste buds. Let’s slip into crayon sketch mode here.
The five human tastes are sweet, salt, umami, acid, bitter — and we have taste receptors that identify each one specifically.
Think of the receptors as doors into corridors. Our receptors are stimulated by chemical and electrochemical information from molecules and ions (electrically charged component parts of molecules in our food and drink).
Information comes to the brain through these channels, the brain then translates and recognises the taste, and reacts.
We differ to some degree in our sensitivity, conditioning, to tastes. If you drink espresso every morning, you are going to have a different bitterness threshold than if you have hot chocolate to start the day.
Here is a heads up. Fact: despite whatever sensory modifications we assimilate via conditioning, culture, or locale, we all share the same five conduits of taste we outlined above. Nature has a survival plan for us, we are programmed with instinctive responses to specific tastes. Some appetitive, some aversive. ‘That is bad for you. Spit it. This is good for you. Eat it.’
Those tastes are hardwired into us at birth and, short of significant trauma, we ALL have instinctive responses to them. Yes, individuals vary, but we have a lot more things in common than we have differences.
We all have the same equipment. We have the same systems. We needed an instruction manual.
Once you learn how to find the (6) relevant elements in wine, (8) relevant elements in food — watch and wonder as the RIGHT things come together! It feels so much better when you know you’re going to be close to finding that ZiNG! thing. Even if you shoot wide, you can figure out what you miscalculated, learn from that and get better as you go along. Pure addictive if you have a curious mind, I tell you.
You can then make the MOST of that recipe from your grandmother, make the MOST of that beautiful bottle your darling brought you, make the most of pizza Tuesdays. Magic moments are worth it.
Don’t wing it. ZiNG! it. You may well elevate the rest of your (food and wine) life.
Cheers, here’s to that.
We’d love to hear from you, perhaps tell us what you’re interested in food and wine wise, any questions or conundrums? We love wine & food conundrums.
Give us a ‘clap’ if you enjoyed what you read today, tell us what you think below.
Click the mailing list OR ‘follow’ if you’d like more from Fearless Food & Wine on Medium.
[Excerpt here first published in ‘The ZiNG! Thing — fearless food and wine together’ 2014 CWC Books (IRL)]
Originally published at medium.com on September 17, 2018.
