Wine lab?

by Christine Parkinson

I’ll soon be obsolete. Not at Hakkasan, of course, where there’s enough work to keep me going for years, but from my role matching food and wine. Someone’s developed a lab technique to do the job, and my skills won’t be needed.

This revelation came at a tasting of Mumm and Perrier-Jouet champagnes, in the form of a ‘Food workshop’. Flavour expert Danny Hodrien led the seminar, and deserves thanks for making an extremely technical subject easy to follow.   Danny explained that gas chromatography and mass spectrometry (see what I mean about technical?) can be used in a laboratory to identify the key flavour compounds in food and drink. He had analysed six of Mumm’s champagnes this way. Several flavour compounds were common to all, but he found that a further three compounds made each wine unique and different from the others. A sort of flavour signature.  

We were given a set of test tubes containing these compounds to sniff. It was fairly easy to identify some well-known flavours, although the names were not exactly familiar. Ethyl caproate for example, smelled of strawberries, furfural of marzipan and butyl caprylate of papaya.   We then tasted each wine, and the test-tube aromas were suddenly quite clear in the glass. So far, so intriguing.  At that point, canapés were handed round, one for each wine. Chef Iain Graham had prepared them specifically to go with each wine’s unique set of flavour compounds. So with Mumm Vintage 2002 (compounds smelling of roasted meat and blue cheese) we had a canapé of pork belly, blue cheese and pain d’epices.  

The really startling thing is that these food matches worked! Iain admitted he would never have put some of the ingredients with Champagne, yet we could all see that the science was right: Identify the flavour compound and you can match a suitable food. In theory every bottle could have a list of its flavour compounds on the label, and it would be possible to pinpoint a perfect food match without even tasting the wine.  

So what does the future hold for wine and food matching? A portable wine analyser, with an inbuilt database of foodstuffs and recipes? Pour a drop of your wine into the machine, and let it choose a dish from the menu? It could happen, I suppose. But my first career was as a chemical analyst, and I’ve no intention of going back to it. Tasting food and matching a wine to it is just so much more fun.