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Happy Wine Wednesday!

It’s basically impossible to follow the seasons here in Los Angeles, so the holidays have a way of really sneaking up on me every year. How is it almost Thanksgiving?!

I’ll be sending out one more issue next Wednesday before taking a break from Thanksgiving onward (and preparing for next year’s issue!). Plus, it’s my birthday the week after that so I’ll be busy keeping the good food and good wine party going…

As we wrap up the year and head into the holidays, let’s take a look back at some of the amazing women we’ve met and things we learned. I know you’ll all be busy with holiday dinners and parties, so we’re getting a refresher on food and wine pairings before chatting again with Stacey Gibson, sommelier and owner of Oregon’s Parallel Food & Drink.

So pour yourself a glass and let’s get our wine (and food) nerd on!

 Food & Wine
Salt, Fat, Alcohol, Tannins 

Wine and food have been A Thing for thousands of years. In fact, for most of Europe’s history, wine was basically food. And water. Aka a truly essential part of life (honestly, I would thrive in ancient Europe…). In fact, they would probably think that the fact that we a.) don’t drink wine with every meal and b.) have to think and talk about how to pair food and wine is completely bonkers!

Before we get into the “rules” of food and wine pairings, it’s important to remember the end goal: joy and comfort. Not every pairing has to be The Best Pairing! Sometimes you have whatever food you have and want to finish that bottle that’s left over. Or you’ve ordered Pizza Hut, you’re ready to have a couch day, and does it really matter if the wine you open pairs well with Pizza Hut? No. But does it make you happy? Or, in the case of a Pizza Hut couch day, provide some comfort? Yes. All of the following should be taken into consideration with that in mind.

Back to the “proper” pairing rules.

The popularity of food and wine pairings is actually pretty recent in the United States. It wasn’t until the 80s that there was an explosion in food magazines pairing wine with their recipes, restaurants offering food and wine dinners, and American wine labels suggesting dishes for pairings. Of course, while this all started as a new and exciting way to increase the enjoyment you get from your food and wine, it also quickly became confusing and anxiety-inducing.

What also makes it difficult is that you’re rarely eating just one thing. What if you have pork with a side of spicy veggies and rice pilaf with coriander, raisins, and nuts? How is one supposed to pair a perfect wine to go with all of the above?

It’s overwhelming. They didn’t have to think about this thousands of years ago! Although, to be fair, they didn’t have this many options then. An Italian grandmother cooking pasta in Tuscany drank sangiovese not because she knew the acidity in the wine balanced the acidity in her tomato sauce, but because that’s what was around.

So first, let’s go back to basics.

If you can remember from elementary school, the taste buds on your tongue can detect 5 flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Those taste buds have primarily served us by ensuring our survival! Sweet, sour, and salty helped us find nutrients, while bitter warned us of potential poison. On the other hand, humans are able to detect tens of thousands of compounds that, for our purposes, we’ll call flavors/aromas. This comes partly from when you smell through your nose, but also from vapor created from chewing your food that travels up to your olfactory bulb.

Food and wine pairing isn’t about focusing on the flavors - partly because who wants to deal with pairing for tens of thousands of flavors? Pairing is about focusing on the five tastes while the flavors accentuate the pleasure from the taste buds. If you can focus on pairing the wine with that core taste in your dish, you’ll be a pairing pro in no time!

First: Always pair with the protein.

Let’s say you have steak with mashed potatoes and side salad. You’re going to grab a bold red to pair with the beef. Have spicy chicken wings? Grab an off-dry Riesling to balance the spice in the chicken. Instead of trying to pair with every single element of the dish, focusing on pairing with the protein will help you narrow down your options!

Now, let’s pair wines by their acid levels, the sour taste -

• Low acid white wine (like chardonnay or viognier): Acidic foods will balance out the wine to make it fruitier. This could be foods with vinegar, like a salad dressing, fruit, or some acidic vegetables

• High acid white wine (like sauvignon blanc or dry riesling): A salty and bitter dish will benefit from the high acid which reduces the salty sensation

• High acid red wine (like sangiovese/Chianti, pinot noir): Fatty foods will taste amazing when the acidity in the red wine cuts through them

Onto the sweet taste, where it gets interesting.

Sugar is hard to pair with. It tends to dull flavors, leading to a boring pairing. This is why you often simply pair desserts with dessert wines, which also tend to be sweet. For a deeper dive into pairing wines with dessert, check out a recent issue here! On the other hand, sweet or off-dry wines (like rieslings) go perfectly with spicy foods.

When you talk about fruit-forward dishes (a combination of sweet and sour), you’ll want to look for wines that are also fruit-forward with fruit-heavy aromas. This could be a pork chop with baked apples or a chicken with apricot glaze, and your go-to wines are Gewürztraminer, muscat, viognier, and riesling.

And for the bitter taste:

We talked about how bitter dishes (like one with kale or lots of black pepper) will benefit from high acidity. Red wines that have a lot of bitterness (meaning a high level of tannins) will be elevated by high-protein dishes (like beef). The tannins in the wine bind with the proteins to smooth them out, making that bitterness taste delicious! These are your typical steakhouse wines, like cabernet sauvignon and syrahs (or shiraz in Australia).

And a final rule-ish of thumb:

When in doubt, go with high acid, or high fruit and low tannin wines. Wines with high acidity (sauvignon blanc, a dry riesling, Chianti, pinot noir) make you want to have some food and, after biting into said food, you’ll want to have another sip of wine. A beautiful step and repeat!

Zinfandel and Châteauneuf-du-Pape are examples of red wines with high fruit and low tannins which are also easy to pair with both simple and complex dishes, whether a grilled chicken or intricate pasta sauce.

Finally, here’s what will probably be the most useful (at least less confusing) part of this issue.

While wine pairing rules can get overwhelming or confusing, it’s really easy to understand wine pairings that are absolutely terrible.

Here’s your list of Do Not Pairs -

• Asparagus: A sulfur compound called mercaptan makes wine pairings metallic and also smells like a wine fault

• Cruciferous veggies (broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, etc.): These also contain sulfur compounds and, when cooked, can contribute to unpleasant tastes in wines

• Eggs: Ditto

• Artichoke: Bad news for grilled artichoke season. A compound in artichokes called cynarin inhibits our receptors for salt, acid, and bitterness resulting in a wine that’s unpleasantly sweet

• High-iron fish like tuna, haddock, sardines: The iron in the fish makes the wine pairing, well, fishy

• Vinegar: Foods high in vinegar (like pickles) can take away the fruit flavors of wine and leave it tasting bitter

• Spicy: The capsaicin can make wines high in alcohol taste very hot, and can also exacerbate the bitterness in high tannin red wines. That’s why you’ll want to pair these with a fruitier or off dry wine, like a sweet Riesling or even a chilled gamay!

Wine and food can truly be a beautiful pairing, but only because they are both delicious and can be enjoyed together, not because it’s a cause of stress and anxiety (or because your snobby date said that’s not the right wine to pair with your meal.)

Like I said at the beginning: if you like the wine, you like the food, and you like them together, that’s a perfectly good pairing to me!

PS. Here’s our cheese pairing issue from a few months ago that should help with all the charcuterie boards you’ll be making over the holidays…

Stacey Gibson

Sommelier, President of Women in Wine, Oregon, and More

Merobebe

Tell us a little about yourself!

Stacey Gibson

I am a sommelier and I own Parallel Food & Drink, a food and wine event company with my husband, who's a chef. We focus on wine pairings and dinners, and we work with a lot of wineries. I also do monthly wine clubs, so we do that and specialty retail.

I am also the president of Women in Wine, Oregon, which is a 1-year term, and have been on the board for a few years.

Merobebe

You don’t have enough things going on!

Let's start at the beginning. What first interested you in wine and actually working in the wine industry?

Stacey Gibson

I went to college, got a Political Science degree, and lived and worked in D.C. for about a year and a half. I even went to graduate school for public policy for a semester. But I just saw no future. Nothing in it was what I wanted to be doing.

My best friend was working at a restaurant in the Flatiron District of New York, and she was like, Just move here, work in my restaurant, live with me – just come to New York. And I thought, You know what? That sounds great. So I was a hostess at a restaurant, and that’s where I met my husband.

Merobebe

What does it mean to be a restaurant wine director?

Stacey Gibson

It can be the same as a sommelier, but ultimately the wine director is the one selecting the wine, buying the wine, putting it on the list, making sure your costing is right. You're also in charge of the finances so when you buy something, you have to price it correctly, put it on the list, make sure that the list is printed correctly, that the button in the computer is charging the correct amount, and that you are storing the wine in a way that your team can find it. It's making sure all those systems work well. But ultimately, the fun part is you get to make the decision! You get to have tasting appointments with [wine sales] reps and decide if you’ll take a case of this or put something on the glass list.

Once you make a selection, it's mostly a job of logistics and making sure the whole program is running how you wanted and how you envisioned. If a guest comes in and they want a sauvignon blanc by the glass but you don’t have it, you need to have something else that the customer will enjoy. So you’re also filling in holes and making sure you have something for everyone – you want to make sure everyone is happy when they come into your restaurant.

Merobebe

As the wine director, do you work closely with the culinary team so that if there's a menu update you can adjust the wine list?

Stacey Gibson

That depends on the restaurant but ideally, that's exactly right. Sometimes, they just tell you that they’re adding a menu item and to make sure the wine goes with it. That's also something that we do with Parallel that is a little different and is why it's so much fun. My husband loves food and cooking – he's passionate about it. He gets excited about wine pairings, especially as a chef, and one of his favorite things is for me to pick the wine and then work backwards. It’s an extra little challenge for him that is fun. But that is really rare. Usually, the food comes first, and then the wine. It depends on the restaurant. Sometimes, like at CorkBuzz, all of the food is incredibly wine friendly.

Merobebe

It would be fun to have a wine flight with a food pairing instead of the other way around!

Stacey Gibson

That’s why we started Parallel. We started with pop ups where we started with the wine first and then built the menu around it. We had a lot of fun with that and then transitioned to catering and now we've been doing more different styles of events, but we want to do more pop ups because they’re so fun and we get to do great pairings.

One of our favorite pairings was from a Portland-based winery called Teutonic. They buy a lot of their grapes from around the Willamette Valley and make a wine they call their Red Blend. It’s gewürztraminer left on the skin, so it’s red, which is then co-fermented with Pinot Noir. It was highly aromatic and we made a seafood curry soup with it. [My husband] was literally making a dish for this wine, which is just so creative and cool. The wine is just wild and I don't think it would have worked the other way – to have a dish and then be like, You know what would go well with this? A skin contact gewürztraminer that’s co-fermented with pinot.  It just wouldn't work that way. That's the kind of stuff that gets us excited that we've been a little away from.

Merobebe

You have Parallel, you're an advanced sommelier, have been a contributing writer for Serious Eats, and worked at various restaurants. Have you faced any challenges being a woman in the male-dominated field of wine and food?

Stacey Gibson

I have a lot of answers depending on the angle. I've had really good male mentors and bosses when I was coming up in the industry. I felt very supported. I felt like there were a lot of men who saw my potential and supported me – but that was also in the wine bubble within the restaurant.

I will say with restaurant management, it's tough because it's hard being a boss in general. When you’re a manager, sometimes you have to make decisions that people are not happy with.

I have this distinct memory – I was the GM and wine director at a restaurant here in Portland, and that was definitely hard for me because it wasn't a wine restaurant and no one appreciated my wine background at all, which was fine. It was also good for me at the time because it's right when I had my daughter and it worked out with scheduling, so I was happy to be working there. It was a really big staff and there were a lot of men on the staff that were mean and I know they still don’t like me. I definitely feel like if it was a man telling them the things I told them, it would have gone differently. There’s still very much the stigma of being shrill, for example. Instead of being a strong boss, you’re a bitchy woman.

There's also still those times where people don't think that I’m the boss. I used to own a wine shop, and one time we had agreed to have a Netflix show film at our shop. It was really cool. Me and one of my employees were clocked out and having so much fun. We were just tucked into a corner, drinking beer and watching. It was such a blast. And the whole night, we were talking to one of the crew members and helping him with whatever he needed, like making sure the AC was shut off and whatnot. Later in the night, one of our regular customers was walking by and he came in to check it out. We were just chatting when the crew member came over and asked the customer if he was the owner. I was like, This guy? No, I’m the owner. This guy doesn’t even work here.

It was kind of bizarre. A white man walks in and you jump to that? You’ve been talking to the owner for 5 hours!

Merobebe

You're the president of Women in Wine, Oregon. Tell us a little bit about what the organization does and why the work you do there is so important.

Stacey Gibson

I’m super jazzed about the work we're doing. It started about five years ago as an annual conference and that's the centerpiece of what we do. But over the five years, we've grown to include year-round happy hours and events, and we're launching a mentorship program. We switched to a membership program where you pay an annual fee and get discounts to the conference and to the happy hours. We also do virtual events that we're going to stick with because they've been pretty successful. It also helps because we really want to be a statewide organization and members down in southern Oregon can participate in the virtual events which are free for members.

I’m excited to see where we keep going. Every president has to lead the ship, and I'm surrounded by a lot of really passionate women. We happen to only have women on our board, although we have had men on our board and we would absolutely let men come to any of our events. We've had some men come to the annual conference. It's really about just being inspired and getting together.

It’s really great for the women in the wine industry because I think of my experience, too – not just breaking up the old boys club but when you put women in a room together, they're going to do some cool stuff.

That's a lot of what Women and Wine Oregon does. Creating connections to get women in a room together and then let some magic happen because in a lot of ways, you just need to get information. You get different people that wouldn't have necessarily met each other to talk together. I love hearing people say, I met this woman at an event and now I have a job offer because I was able to get my resume to the top of the pile. That is exactly what we want to do.

We always talk about how when you put women in charge of a community, they are going to work hard for everybody. It's funny because there are so many great men out there, really, truly. But sometimes when you see women winemakers and business owners, especially small business owners, they really care about their community and they want to make sure they're taking care of their employees. They're more intentional about how they see their employees and how they're providing for their employees.

Merobebe

What are some other ways that you think that the wine industry can better not only support but also promote the work of female wine growers and business owners?

Stacey Gibson

I think women are already doing really amazing things and sometimes it’s just letting other people know, with marketing and PR – pushing women to the front. For women winemakers, sometimes that’s just access to sales channels or capital and the ability to hire someone to run their tasting or hire someone to do national sales while they’re doing the [winemaking]. I also think women tout themselves less, so we need to find a way to be like, Here’s my brand, and really putting it out front and building confidence. I mean, there’s so many ways but I think a lot of it goes back to access to capital because you could be the best winemaker in the world who's making 100 cases a year. But if you don’t have the money, you can’t buy more grapes to make more wine, or to market it. I think that’s also just a small business issue as well. And then it’s, how do I take the next step? How can it sustain you personally? How can you live off of it? And a lot of that is marketing, which can be expensive. It’s important to let women tell their stories!

Get a wine-related movie or book pairing for your weekend.

Today’s pairing is the “Reign of Terroir” episode from Netflix’s docuseries, Rotten (episode 2 of season 2)

French wine terrorists, a swinger’s party room, and counterfeit Chinese wine: this Rotten episode has it all! In case you missed the series, Rotten investigates food supply chains to reveal the truths and suffering behind the foods we eat (like the avocado cartels in Mexico). In “Reign of Terroir,” the series interviews frustrated winemakers in France’s Languedoc-Roussillon who are literally blowing shit up to fight off cheaper wine imports from Spain and a quickly growing (and award-winning) competition from China.

Grab your favorite French wine and settle in for a wild ride!

Watch the season 2 trailer here

Only one more issue this year…!

Let me know what wine adventures you’re up to! Any go-to holiday meals and pairings? Got any fun holiday plans? Or have suggestions for wine topics I should dive into next year?

Hit reply and let me know – I want to hear from you! :)

See you next Wednesday!

Cheers,

Megumi

Have questions or feedback? Want to suggest a wine topic, woman in wine, or vinotainment pairing? Just reply to this email!

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