Readership Survey
Prof's new book aims to demystify the process of pairing food with wine and raise the level of gastronomic satisfaction from enjoyable to memorable
BY REBECCA KENDALL
If you have trouble deciding which wine goes with what food, help is on the way in the form of a new book by Prof. Bob Harrington, Hospitality and Tourism Management. Photo by Martin Schwalbe
Choosing a bottle of wine to serve with dinner shouldn't be a stressful task, says Prof. Bob Harrington, Hospitality and Tourism Management (HTM). Instead, visiting a wine shop and making a selection should be an adventure. “Variety is the spice of life,” he says. “It's a lot of fun to look around at what's available and mix it up a bit.”
Very few wines will ruin a meal, but knowing how to make better choices can raise the level of gastronomic satisfaction from enjoyable to memorable, says Harrington, who joined U of G in 2005 and has more than 30 years of practical and professional experience in hospitality. He uncorks his know-how in a new book called Food and Wine Pairing: A Sensory Experience, scheduled for release in February 2007.
The book serves up an overview of food and wine pairing, how food preparation methods can influence a match, and information about how the geography and climate of a region affect the food that's grown there.
“I wanted to demystify the whole process,” says Harrington, adding that everyone from academics and students to industry workers and consumers can use his book to improve their skills. “People will learn, for example, that a saltier meal goes best with a wine with effervescence to cleanse the palate.”
Readers will acquire this kind of knowledge through a series of exercises that are loosely based on a system he heard about while travelling through the Piedmont region of Italy with students from the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Louisiana. Harrington was dean of the institute from 2001 to 2005.
Piedmont's wine professionals used a grid to assess food and wine pairing, and he decided to develop a more user-friendly tool that would be useful to a variety of wine drinkers.
“The original grid was a little too complicated to understand without some significant training,” he says. “The version in my book uses a more hierarchical approach to pairing decisions and creates a profile of the most prominent relationships of wine and food elements.”
Harrington created a scale that identifies a variety of tastes and intensities. For example, food sweetness ranges from a Triscuit cracker on the low end to a Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookie on the high end. Similarly, wine sweetness varies from a Brut sparkling wine to a cream sherry.
“I may find something very sweet or mildly bitter, whereas someone else may disagree. By standardizing the progressions of these anchors with common food items, I have equalized that and given everyone the same starting point from which to assess flavours, textures and other components.”
Also included in the scale are foods that represent measures of acidity, saltiness, bitterness, fattiness, overall body, spiciness, flavour intensity and persistence.
The idea is to create a relationship where the wine and food are equal partners in the match, says Harrington. Foods that are high in saltiness, bitterness, sourness and sweetness limit the possibilities when matching wines with them. The key is to know what flavours and intensities in food complement those found in wine and vice versa, he says. When it comes to food, people tend to enhance the eating experience by complementing sweet with sour, for example. The addition of a matching sensory experience of wine adds another layer to that, he says.
“They can interact in an interesting way. There's a never-ending interaction and variety, and you can learn something new every day. Even if you have the same food using the same recipe, there will be slight variations if you have someone else preparing it.”
Teaching members of the hospitality industry how to recommend a positive wine and food pairing has many beneficial effects, says Harrington.
“From a business perspective, we want guests to come away maximizing their customer or gastronomic satisfaction.”
When staff are trained to enhance the dining experience, customers are not only more likely to make return visits to a restaurant, but they'll also be more apt to order wine with their meals, resulting in more revenue for a restaurant, he says.
In addition, learning more about the pairing process encourages people to experiment on their own by browsing wine shops more knowledgeably and having fun in their own kitchens by creating dishes that blend well with their wine selection.
“Part of it's an art, and part of it's science,” says Harrington, noting that part of the fun lies in sampling the food and wine being worked with. “What could be bad about that? Even when they don't go together, it's still good.”
Harrington grew up on a small ranch in Moses Lake, Wash., which is part of the second largest wine-making region in the United States, and his parents raised cattle and grew much of their own food. Many of his early memories involve watching his parents work the land and helping to make homemade preserves, pickles and sauerkraut.
In his teens, he took a job in a restaurant and decided that following high school, he'd become a chef. He apprenticed with chefs in Washington, Idaho and Oregon and worked for a number of hotels, including the Marriott, Crowne Plaza and Red Lion.
At 31, he decided he wanted to match his experience with academic background and enrolled full time at Boise State University while still working full time as an executive chef. He earned a bachelor of business administration from Boise in 1994 and MBA and PhD degrees from Washington State University in 1996 and 2001.
“All the theory they were talking about in the classroom I could relate to my previous management experiences in the work environment, and because I was working full time, I tried to apply much of what I was learning to my job. It made it much more relevant and easier, and I was forced to develop my time-management skills because I was doing both simultaneously.”
In March, he shared his skills with the University community by creating a four-course meal for an appreciation dinner held for Corey Dalton, HTM executive-in-residence during the winter semester. The meal, based on a seven-course food and wine menu inspired by the Pacific Northwest, is featured in Harrington's upcoming book.
This summer, he'll travel to Hong Kong to do wine and food pairing studies at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Similar tasting panels will be set up in Guelph and Toronto, and Harrington will use data from the three locations to assess differences between Asian and North American opinion when it comes to matching and enjoying different food and wine combinations.
