CORKSCREW
a part of it. Here was the missing piece of this island’s terroir. It was people. But also, it was patience. Is a wine representative of this place because it shed an ocean 150 million years ago, and now the vines roots trickle beneath metres of fossilized oyster shells? I thought that might be a starting point. Thus, I inhaled books on soil geology. Mapped out the entire island and in my mind I could see wine regions like Beaujolais popping up a few miles away where volcanic schist appeared 120 million years ago. Or Gabbro soil in the Loire Valley of France, which glistens with nickel and quartz and decorates most of Fogo island. This wine called Muscadet smells like sea salt and flaked fish. It’s how the house smells when you open up the window. And it’s grown on the same soil somewhere else. But wine pairings aren’t just about smelling things and rocks. As I’ve learned, food is more than that. It’s the creative exercise of one person’s mind, and it’s habit based. I have tasted tens of thousands of dishes in ten years as a sommelier (10 plates a day on average, for 260 days a year, times 10 years is 26,000 dishes) and most of the time the pairing changes if the chef picks up smoking, or drinks lots of Pepsi, or isn’t sleeping right, or is going through a divorce. It also changes if any of that is happening to me, especially if I’m not hydrating. (For the record, none of that is happening here that I can tell. Pepsi is rarely sighted in the hands of a chef.) Inconsistent seasoning and emotional Not trying the dishes out is a big one, too. I realize that a lot of this will be controversial, even for experts in the field. When the entire mood of the cuisine is the island itself. Well, you have to understand the island more than the chef. How to figure out pairings from an unchartered cuisine? I borrowed state are the main factors for any sommeliers failures with pairing.
from food chemistry. I read through hundreds of years of trade history. I was given a book that my employer had commissioned about the plants of the island and I scrawled a hundred pages of disjointed thoughts along the margins. I might have been struggling. I had many all encompassing conversations with the whole team about history, intention, and philosophies. I audited the recipe books for consistent ingredients and asked for access to the kitchen inventory. I read every article ever produced here and dug through the endless thoughts of the many people who had graced the wine program. And they were brilliant. However, there were so many meetings with them, I didn’t have time to have a single sip of wine until the day before guests arrived. Well, then I tried them all, in one afternoon. I was not drunk, just inspired by the device that could pull out a single taste of every bottle there without exposing the wine to an untimely and vinegary death. Maybe a little tipsy. Tough gig. Further to that, I remembered it all, but only because that workday was 18 hours long, of my own joyful volition. In the end I settled on this. If you need to do a pairing at home: squeeze a lemon on a dish if the wine makes your mouth water. If the wine dries out your gums, flicker salt all over your steak. If the wine is too big for the piece of poached salmon, enrobe it with cream. Find the right weight, or make it happen all on your own. It’s a lot easier to plop a bridge ingredient on a dish than it is to alter the wine. And I’ve tried that, too. There is a place in hell for me from the time I injected argon C02 into a bottle of juicy red wine just to freshen it up for a pairing that nobody ever tasted except for me. And when all is lost, smell and taste the dish and wait for an image to pop in your mind, if you’re lucky. But if you’re out there turning over rocks and cracking through branches, or picking up seaweed from a few metres from the shoreline, smell it. Commit it to
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