What do you think? Impossible?!?

The “impossibility” of the pairing centers on two things: 1) kimchi and spices and 2) a culture clash that came up in our previous discussion about whether wine (and alcohol) should be seen as a complement to the food or as a “palate cleanser,” a role that the high-octane soju often performs at Korean feasts.

Playing sommelier for the evening, I selected a range of wines including bubblies, aromatic whites, and some reds. The actual selection is often limited by the practical consideration of which wines you can actually find in your market. I chose the wines from Garnet Wine & Liquors, a store near the residence of the repast. Here’s a copy of the order:

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to try all the wines (there were only 14 people). We started off with the two bubblies, both from Roederer but one from California’s Anderson Valley and the other from Champagne, as a way to highlight the differences between the two regions. Paired with the dumplings, they both were good and popular but I preferred the cut of the Champagne. It also worked well with the jeon later in the meal, I found.

Moving to the table, we had a smorgasbord of Korean delights. I poured the aromatic whites and the Hermann J. Wiemer pleasantly surprised people who were programmed not to like either gewurztraminer or New York wines. The Van Volxem riesling fro the Saar was a big hit. I also brought a Lucien Crochet Sancerre to try the acid/mineral pairing and although the wine itself was good enough, it kind of bombed with the food (I should have tried it with the kimbap though).

The fruit and acidity of Pierre Chermette Beaujolais Vielles Vignes worked well. By the time the grilled beef bulgoki came out, so did Bonny Doon Le Pousseur syrah and the Ridge Lytton Springs zinfandel. I had chosen these on the “palate cleanser” end of things but the syrah seemed overshadowed while the zin was impressive and quite popular. In the end, I even tried a soju and it wasn’t as frightening as I had feared!

Thanks to some suggestions on the previous thread, our hosts even had some delicate white kimchi (baek), which was quite delicious on its own. I think I had already had the soju at this point so forgot to pair with wine…

Anyway, Korean food may have some challenges for wine pairing but they can be overcome! We had fun and I look forward to more experimenting of this kind in the future. Give it a try because even if you are a wine geek who still feels it is impossible, then there’s always the fallback: drink first, eat later.

Fried dumplings
Chicken yakitori [japanese inspiration]
Beef skewers (do you know bulgoki?)
Squid/spicy sauce
A variety of “jun” (pictured, right) which is something like potato pancakes but with fish, beef, vegetables, or seafood
California roll or ”kimbap” which is rolled “maki” with veggies/beef
Side vegetables – pickled, salad-like

Apparently it is impossible to pair Korean food with wine! And I’m not just saying that. Consider this comment from sommelier-to-the-max, Rajat Parr (from What to Drink with What you Eat): “I love Korean food, but it’s hard to have any kind of wine with it unless you have a Vinho Verde or something that’s really high in acid…the acidity in kimchee just kills wine and it’s all over.”

What do you think: do you buy the high acidity suggestion? Or do you prefer something aromatic and off-dry? How about bubbles? Or something slightly oxidative? Do reds work? Or is pairing Korean food with wine impossible!?!

Related: “Kimchi: impossible food-wine pairing?“

Consider this exchange. Paul Grieco, owner of Hearth restaurant and Terroir wine bar in NYC, tweeted that he was going on the TODAY show to talk wine and chocolate. (See segment here: both regular and sparkling shiraz feature.) Eric Asimov tweets back “chocolate and wine? what are you thinking, man? Who cares about what to drink with chocolate? Food mag nonsense.”

Oooh, snap! Wine and chocolate are two fine things. But this is one of those “impossible” pairings that has yet to convince me. My rule of thumb: Have wine before dinner. Have wine with dinner. But let chocolate dessert stand alone! Then resume drinking, if necessary. (Or try a Banyuls with the chocolate dessert if it’s a question of life or date.)

Have your say about the great chocofight 2010 in the comments–or with the latest poll!

The hand sized-pie is made of a variety of meats (perhaps at once), and topped with ketchup, known locally as tomato sauce. Served hot, they can be purchased in grocery stores, convenience stores, gas stations, sporting events and pretty much anywhere in the country.

So even though Eric Asimov reaches for the closest dump bucket every time he hears us ask it, is pairing wine and meat pies… impossible?!

Friend-of-the-blog Eric Arnold did his own meat pie and wine experiments while spending a year in New Zealand, a country with its own pie predilection. As he details in a chapter in his book, First Big Crush, Eric lined up an array of “greasy, heart-attack inducing” pies including steak and kidney, steak and cheese, and “Mexican.” He poured New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Merlot and a rosé and invited the makers of those exact wines along for a tasting. Lo and behold, not only did they take it surprisingly seriously, but they had fun with it! To see the results of their pairings, check out chapter 18 of his book.

So we need to pair this viewing with some food. Since we have previously tackled wings and chips and salsa, this time we round out the viewing with something heartier: seven layer dip!

For those of you who haven’t enjoyed the dish, imagine a layer of refried beans imbued with chiles or other seasoning, then slather on a couple of ripe avocados (or guacamole), smother that in an inch of sour cream, then add an inch of salsa, some lettuce, cheese and possibly olives. Scoop it out with tortilla chips. Although it may sound gross to the uninitiated, it has an amazingly magnetic effect on those in the room.

So what would you pair with seven layer dip–or is it impossible?!?

They are heavy, indeed, but that is OK: Fruitcake looks best in thinly sliced cross sections. [See image at right from Slate.com--ed.] Studded with fruit and nuts, it reminds me of salami’s piebald patterns of fat and peppercorns. Like salami, too, I think fruitcake tastes swell alongside slivers of nice old cheddar or parmesan. In, fact, I’d argue that fruitcake, with its aging and its complexity, is essentially the charcuterie of the baking world. If that’s not a way to get some traction among today’s foodies, I don’t know what is.

Oooh, charcuterie! Well, we should be able to pair that with wine–except for the rum, apricots, golden raisins, kalamata figs, coconut, and dates. So which wine with you pair with fruitcake? Or is it impossible?!?

Related: Goodbye Wassail, Hello Christmas Smoking Bishop

Let’s shed some light on the wine pairing for…latkes! Seems like a blank slate to me, starchy potato (with some onion, salt and pepper) simmered in olive oil. So have at it–or is it impossible?

And if you want to make it a Hanukkah duo, the gentleman also asked for a pairing with jelly doughnuts. That may require a second bottle…

But cutting to the chase for us wine geeks, are the wines fulfilling a great partnership with the food? One course in particular caught my eye: guests wanting the green curry shrimp with smoked collard greens will be offered the Beckmen, Garnache [sic] from the Santa Ynez. While I haven’t tried the wine, one of Beckmen’s other grenache wines rolls in at 15.6% alcohol, not exactly my recipe for good times with green curry. I might just hold on to that Riesling from the previous course if I were seated next to Dr. Sanjay Gupta, Jhumpa Lhiri, Bobby Jindal or Steven Spielberg tonight.

What would you pair if you were the USA sommelier with this course? (Only American wines are served at the White House.) Full menu selections come after the jump.

Potato and Eggplant Salad
White House Arugula
With Onion Seed Vinaigrette
2008 Sauvignon Blanc, Modus Operandi, Napa Valley, California
≈
Red Lentil Soup with Fresh Cheese
2006 Riesling, Brooks “Ara”, Wilamette Valley, Oregon
≈
Roasted Potato Dumplings
With Tomato Chutney
Chick Peas and Okra
or
Green Curry Prawns
Caramelized Salsify
With Smoked Collard Greens
and
Coconut Aged Basmati
2007 Granache, Beckmen Vineyards, Santa Ynez, California
≈
Pumpkin Pie Tart
Pear Tatin
Whipped Cream and Caramel Sauce
Sparkling Chardonnay, Thibaut Janisson Brut, Monticello, Virginia
≈
Petits Fours and Coffee
Cashew Brittle
Pecan Pralines
Passion Fruit and Vanilla Gelees
Chocolate-Dipped Fruit

Full formal menu (pdf); image a reduced size crop from whitehouse.gov

So, which wine would you pair with these delicious, autumnal ravioli? I have some thoughts but will hold them for the comments.

To anticipate your comments, I didn’t call it “impossible” as is my wont, because it’s merely a tricky blend of sweet, salt, fat and herbs.

If you want an impossible pairing for this week, surf over to the WSJ and read Jonathan Safran Foer on eating dog. But apparently eating a low-fat diet will make you less pissy than eating a low carb diet, so maybe staying here and thinking about pasta will put you in a better mood.

As candy washes over the country these days in a giant, wrapper-encrusted wave, it seems only timely: which wine goes with Halloween candy? Or is it impossible?!?

Please make your candy suggestions as trashy as possible–no gourmet chocolates here, just Reese’s peanut butter cups, KitKats, Almond Joy, Butterfinger, Pop Rocks and/or Necco wafers.

For those of you who cannot fathom pairing candy and wine, then play sommelier for Paul Rudnick: as profiled in yesterday’s NYT, the 51 year old man weighs 150 pounds and subsist almost entirely on candy.

Sushi, it’s still all the rage! Despite warnings from the NYT dining section about mercury levels and an economy that is softer than a fatty toro, the WSJ recently declared that “recession or no recession,” sushi “is not going anywhere.” “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto pointed to the the ubiquity of sushi to go places as a sign of the degree to which it is now embedded in our culture.

You don’t have to love sushi as much as Jeremy Piven to think about which wine pairs with this delectable treat. Why not go with a trio of commonly ordered items such as salmon nigiri, tuna maki and tamago? (Or add your own favorite.) Which wine would you pair with sushi–or is it impossible?!?

Or at least at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina fair, where a reporter filed this tasting note from the fairgrounds:

Fried cheese is heaven. Would fried butter be Nirvana? We had to find out…Will fried butter be this year’s runaway food sensation of the Dixie Classic Fair? Well, it’s novel. It’s tasty. But it’s no funnel cake, just this year’s fad. But it’s also hard to top. It’s a fluffy, airy pocket of fried batter, basically — the heat of the oil melts most of the butter — sweet and salty at the same time. We felt invigorated. We felt sick.

So what do you say, what goes with deep fried butter–or is it impossible?!? (Sugar, as depicted above, is optional.) And if you think this is hard, at least I didn’t challenge you with this week’s atrocity, Paula Deen’s donut bacon cheeseburger.

If you’re looking for more traditional fare, we previously tried our hand at pairing wine with butternut squash soup.

HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot.

Whoa–talk about impossible food-wine pairings!! Surely we can do better for Mayor Mike than merlot? Which wine with you pair with burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches? Or are they…impossible?!? Answer well and it could lead to Senior Pairings Expert in a possible future Bloomberg administration?!

Related: Elvis’ version of the peanut butter, bacon, banana (!) and butter (!!) sandwich

So before the summer weather escapes us and our dining is driven indoors, which wine would you pair with cucumber soup? Or is it…impossible?!?

image