Hi folks,

Say you roll out of bed last week for a celebratory post-election egg sandwich from your local bodega (your mayor-elect’s objectively correct go-to order, naturally). ‘What wine should I drink with this?’ was probably not the first question on your lips.

Maybe it was inevitable after four years of writing bodega pairing suggestions for every bottle I used in a wine class. Even if my 9:30 a.m. beverage of choice last Wednesday wasn’t wine (I made coffee and treated myself to an ume plum seltzer), pairings for my egg and cheese on a roll with jalapeños was my very next step.

So in the spirit of never giving Instagram an exclusive, here’s the little list I made that day for those of you having breakfast for dinner, or a very wet brunch — and after that, some thoughts on how wine and food pairings work, and some tools that might be helpful in making them yourself:

moscatel love the headspinning dry-but-sweet-but-dry-but-sweet thing moscatel does on the skins, and — this is crucial — it talks to the jalapeños gredos garnacha in case you want ketchup on your roll, this mountain range slash national park grows grenache like nowhere else mediterranean white this could be a lot of things — it’s a big sea — but Lebanese merwah from Eddie Chami at Mersel, honeyed and salty-savory, would be perfect rosato frizzante I actually veered just slightly here with my ultimate preference, because while you want the folks working in Emilia who are kicked out of the lambrusco factories and make pink wine that tastes like salami I also think it’d be super fun to cop a bottle of the pinot meunier rifermentato, “Mangiafuoco”, from Villa Picta on the other side of the floodplain, so far north it’s almost Lombardy.

How does pairing work, anyway? Here are a few things I’m thinking about when I’m making a list like this:

What’s that wine like? Aromatics matter less here than how it sits and the way it’s built: dense and rich vs ethereal and gauzy, velcro-y and spiky versus plush and velvety, electric streak of acidity versus moonlit and peaceful.

Both can work, here. You can use wine as a squeeze of lemon, or your wine can be baked butter and breadcrumbs, but either is a valid approach to an oyster:

Lemon squeeze vs Rockefeller (which I see I’ve misspelled above, great) unlocks something else, too, which is that for pairing purposes wine is basically another condiment. Those texture questions you’re asking of your wine, above — acid structure, richness v sharpness, weight, etc — are the same questions you’d be asking while building a chutney or a gravy or a salad dressing. How tart? Enough salt? A little more fat or sugar?

This was the approach we took when we designed a judging rubric last year for an [ABV] Ferments pairing competition, matching a whole rainbow of domestic hybrids and alternative fruit ferments with Trinidadian doubles (channa on two bara, fried flatbreads, with condiments ranging from sweet to sour to spicy, here’s a 2011 short film Doubles With Slight Pepper from Canadian director Ian Harnarine mostly about the significance and comfort of the street food for the Trinidadian diaspora):

A lot of classically-trained sommelier approaches to pairing look at bitterness, spice, sweetness, etc as things for the wine to tamp down, control, cleanse, or soften. (There’s a kinda thoughtless hurling of off-dry riesling towards any cuisine defined by a little bit of heat, or strong flavor, often without thinking about how the two would get along. A silvery little songbird kabinett does not sound like the best match for the deep red smoky-sweet heat of Korean guchujang! I’ll forever credit Jahdé Marley for being the person that unlocked, for me, the idea that plush, red-fruited reds can be the tamarind paste for your spice.)

Two other things come out of this. One is that actual sauce is going to be a lot more important than whether you’re eating fish, or chicken, a whole roasted cauliflower head, etc.

(The question isn’t “What wine goes with chicken?” It’s “What do you rub your chicken with? What are you dipping it in? What’s on the side?” And the question definitely isn’t, “Can red wine go with fish?” Does a little hot pepper sauce on that red snapper sound good? Ok, then!)

The other thing: building a pairing spectrum out of condiments for Trinidadian doubles underlines that there is no food that isn’t “for” wine.

I know that coming up, I was certainly taught “If it grows together, it goes together”. You still hear it all of the time, as truism: thoughtlessly repeated, slipping into the speech of the next generation of wine language users alongside WSET chestnuts like “wine body is like nonfat, skim, and whole milk,” or the discredited pseudoscience of “tongue zones” for bitter or sweet.

The dangerous flip side of “grows together / goes together” is, “if wine doesn’t grow there, its food can’t be paired with.”

Not only is this wrong — let me introduce miso paste to your lees-aged white wines! — the just-so stories of grows together / goes together are moreover built on fantasy. If you’re all about, let’s say, Chianti and red sauce as a natural pairing, you’re not talking about two things that are tied together in truth via blood and soil, you’re talking about a wine that doesn’t taste anything like it did a hundred and fifty years ago (when it would have been a light pink co-ferment of red and white grapes) paired with ragu made from a fruit that wasn’t even cultivated in Italy until after the Americas were colonized.

Look, it’s ok if you think a certain Italian wine tastes good with pizza. But the reason they taste good together — texture, shape, wine as sauce — doesn’t have anything to do with what country the wine is from. “Italian wine” is not a useful or coherent category for almost anything you’d want to get insight into, “Italy” is imaginary, the nation-state is a violent hallucination, don’t make me cry again while reading the end of the Italo Svevo chapter about Trieste and ethnonationalism in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity, all right?

The deepest and most important pairing truth is that there isn’t one that’s perfect — because what would that mean, anyway?

There are pairings that make certain components of a dish or parts of a wine pop out in ways that you didn’t see before: suddenly you’re keyed in to that bassline or the synth lick in the bridge.

There are pairings that unfold or amplify what was already center stage: double tracked vocals in the chorus, call and response.

Wine is sauce, but food is never the only thing on the table.

There are the people with us, the money on the line, our own bodies and how they bend with light and heat, the emotional valence (take the bar I was in last week on election night).

There would be more than one answer if only because every situation is just a little bit different — the Heraclitus thing about never crossing a river twice. (The water has changed, or you have).

There’s more than one answer anyway, because there just is — more than one right way of finding a match for an experience in a way that unfolds, enlivens, reveals more of the thing to you than you’d previously noticed, sparks emotion.

That spectrum of possibility — so many potential right answers! I know, it can be a little overwhelming — means that we can go further than choosing the merely functional. Why not celebrate the work of people we can care about?

Here’s the last bit of the [ABV] rubric: the part where we had to decide why one pairing was working better than another.

I think a lot about this in the context of judging wines in professional settings, where we often become more likely to reward a lack of flaws, or to see success as merely functional, than we are to celebrate the idiosyncratic, slightly unknit, or unpredictable. What does it mean, actually, for a wine, or a wine pairing moment, to be really, really good?

That last piece of the puzzle brings us back to where we started.

Pairing an egg and cheese on a roll with jalapeños you’re going to want to think about the richness of that cheese melt, the sharp heat and tang (most places are doing pickled jalapeños but some places do fresh), whether you want to cut it with acidity or fizz or double down with something richer. Whether the condiment you’re looking for is mayo or Frank’s Red Hot or, idk, a green mango chutney?!

But you also might as well think about who you’re choosing.

(Leo Erazo and Roberto Henríquez in Itata and Bío Bío; Barbara Requejo Frutos in Gredos; Eddie Chami and team in northern Lebanon; Paolo Pasini and Amanda Smeltz in Lombardy…and hey WE’VE GOT A MAYOR)

<3,
grape kid

I’d meant to throw in a longer piece in here about the holiday wine club shipment which is going out in early December (sign-ups close at the end of this month, and I haven’t talked a lot about it yet!) — but this was already long enough. I’ll write a little something separately and send it out later this week. In the meantime, you can preview it here.