Wine & Food Pairing

In a pretty clever marketing ploy, the San Francisco-based Amazing Food Wine Company has created Wine That Loves - wines named not for the grapes in them but for the foods they are meant to be drunk with: pizza, steak, grilled salmon, roast chicken, and pasta with tomato sauce. Wines for grilled chicken, Chinese food, and macaroni and cheese are in the works.

They're really doing it differently. For example, the typical back label, which on many wines says what the grape varieties are and in what percentages, is entirely missing. Instead there are explanations of the wines intensity, acidity, tannin, and flavor, as perceived by the company's master taster. No vintages are listed, either, so in fact, you really don't know what or "when" you're getting. And all you do know is that someone who (presumably) knows a lot about pairing has done his or her homework.

This, of course, takes the guesswork out of pairing for a lot of folk but may actually create some guesswork - and some skepticism - among others who want to know what they're buying.

Stay tuned...we'll review some of these as soon as we can get 'em, supposedly in May.

UPDATE - May, 2008

Brian Hammill and I tasted the line of Wine That Loves at the New York Wine Expo in March at the Javits Conference Center. They were indeed serving (finger) food with their wines, and I have to say that the food, mediocre as it was, was better than the wines.

The idea is interesting but the execution of it here is poor. The people pouring the wine, including a number of employees - not just temps hired for the tradeshow - either couldn't or perhaps wouldn't tell us what varietals were in the wines. That alone made me wonder.

Tasting the wines gave us some clues, obviously, but there was nothing that stood out as good enough for either of us to really think hard about what they were pouring. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed mildly insulting...the idea that consumers are either too lazy or stupid to be concerned with what they were putting in their mouths.