Hasta la vista baby

by Chris Losh

I don’t often have my head turned by science. Mainly because I don’t understand it. But before Christmas I went along to a science-based food and wine matching that was not only genuinely fascinating, but might just change the way sommeliers do their job.

If any of this sounds at all familiar, it’s because Christine Parkinson was lucky enough to go along to a similar event a couple of weeks earlier, and has already written in her blog about how it all worked. So I won’t go into any great depth here as to what it was all about beyond saying that the brave chaps at Mumm/Perrier-Jouet had put their wines through a gas chromatograph (no, me neither) which had, effectively, split them up into their constituent flavour compounds. They then took this information and gave it to a chef, asking him to use it to come up with dishes that would match the wine.

Of course, some of the flavour compounds picked out by the Nose-inator are the kind of things you’d expect to find in wine, but it was eye-opening (even eye-watering) to discover that champagne has elements that are also found in things like blue cheese, crab, rum and sweetcorn...

Desperately trying not to get sidetracked by the ‘that’s amazing’ side of things that always pathetically impresses Luddite arts graduates such as myself, there are, I think, two key points here.

Firstly, like Christine, I was astonished at how good the food matches were. While there might have been structural elements that were less-than perfect (too much/too little body to the wine or too little/not enough acidity to go with a dish, for instance)the actual flavour matches were amazingly good – even with pairings that looked ambitious on paper, such as an nv rosé with tuna, mango, chilli and green papaya salad or Mumm vintage with pork belly and blue-cheese mash.

Secondly, given how successful the matches were, it’ll be interesting to see where the wine industry goes with this. Cynics might say ‘given its track record with innovation, probably nowhere’ but, although this might have started out as a PR exercise aimed at getting people to work with a couple of champagne brands, I get the feeling that it could be the starting point for something a lot bigger.

On the evidence of what both I and Christine tasted, there’s really something to be said for using science to bring a bit of rigour to a process that has always been so, well, non-rigorous.

And while it might sound a bit like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, I think this is something that sommeliers might want to have a think about. I can’t see a machine ever putting you out of a job (the human nose, we were told, is way more sensitive than any machine). But used correctly it can open up some amazing and unusual matches, simply by suggesting things to you that you might never have considered.

Twenty years ago, I don’t think any of us would have expected to be quite so plugged in and linked in to each other as we are today via the internet and wifi, but once someone finds a practical use for a technology it’s amazing how quickly it can be adapted, adopted, and become commonplace.

I’m not suggesting that every restaurant will have a gas chromatograph alongside its bank of ovens, that sommeliers will swap their jackets for lab coats, or that the eateries of Britain will be supervised by a kind of robo-nose dictating what wine we should drink. But I do think that we’ll hear more about this technology over the next 12 months.

Oh, and if you don’t believe that it works, just go and try the deconstructed apple and caramel dessert at Caprice (with apples poached in cognac, parkin and crème brulee) with the Mumm demi-sec. I’m not big on either desserts or sweet fizz, but this was absolutely to die for!

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  For more information contact Danny, science guru, on 01604 646585, or visit the <a href="http://www.fandfprojects.com" target="_blank&quot;">F&F Projects website</a> to see what he could do for you. </address>