Food usually takes center stage when it comes to planning a menu. But what happens when you flip that concept and instead focus your meal around wine?
Below, Sara Fowler, winemaker at PEJU Province Winery, a sustainable and family-owned winery in Napa Valley, and PEJU Chef Nic Montañez share their tips for crafting a meal *around* wine.
Can you talk about the process of crafting a meal around wine? We so often pair wines to go with food, how do you do it in reverse?
Chef Nic: In a good food and wine pairing, the food will enhance the wine and the wine will enhance the food. So that's what you find— that good balance. You have to take to play with your taste buds and mainly with the five flavor elements (sweet, salty, sour, bitter, umami).
Sara: One of the things we do is teach people that it's all about food science. It's science and we go back to the five elements. It's about the sugar, salt, the fat, the acid, and the umami. You want to be able to balance flavors, so he'll bring these foods out and we're always kind of going like 'this would be great, but we need to dial back this.'
What are the things you consider to select a wine and begin building a menu around that?
Chef Nic: As a chef, or anybody that knows just a little bit about wine at home, you always want to start with lighter wines. It's very similar when you think how you start with food, you start from very light and then medium, and then heavy, and of course, then dessert.You start thinking bigger wine, bigger flavors and seasonality is very important. It also depends on each palate of each chef. You start with what flavors you like, what ingredients you enjoy, and then you start building from there.
Sara: I like seasonality and considering the function. Here at the winery though, I will say it's about what season and what wine we just released. For a lot of the reds when they first get released, maybe they're a little younger so we have to choose different food, but six months from then, or a year we're going to choose a different food for it.
And every vintage is a little bit different, so it gets more complex. For example, 2008 was a lower, heavy, concentrated yield so the sugar content was higher than the 2011, which was more, austere and higher acid. And, and certainly didn't have the sugar content. You can't just say it's Cabernet Sauvignon, it's really more complicated. So the age of the wine and how long it's been in bottle—all of those little things really play a part in choosing [the menu].
What’s the process of creating a menu and where do you draw inspiration?
Chef Nic: When you start a new menu, as a chef or a wine maker, you always want something new or something better. But the main thing to influence a menu has a lot to do with what's in season. It's very important to have what's in season, because the ingredients are at their best and especially in the summer, which is one of my favorite times of year.
In terms of what inspires my menus, my childhood— my country, I'm from Mexico — a lot of times I combine things or ingredients that I use there, but we can have it here. Also travel can influence me. I like to still read a lot of cookbooks and you get information on an ingredient that I haven't seen it for a while, so I'll say let's see what it tastes like, or it's something I know already (but forgot) and suddenly reading about it makes it come back to me.
Any final words of advice?
Chef Nic: At the end, just follow your intuition. You may hit one of those unexpected beautiful pairings. Or you may say, well, next time, I'll probably choose a different [wine] or change your menu.