I recently read an article in Food and Wine Magazine about a book on pairing wine and foods.  The book is Taste Buds and Molecules by Francois Chartier.  This book suggests that food and wine can be paired by choosing combinations that contain minute quantities of organic chemicals like estragole, sotolon, or rotundone and, when done properly, can have amazing results.  The concept is called “molecular pairing.”  I thought the idea was interesting and that I might buy the book and do some experimenting.  But that will be for another day.

Last Wednesday was leftover day at our house.  I was dining on some leftover chicken Marsala
and linguini with homemade marinara.  It was delicious the first time and almost as good the second time around.  I had a couple half empty (or half full) bottles of wine, also leftover, and started with a glass of Block 506 Russian River Pinot Noir.  Nice.  Then I switched to a glass of Elm Tree Malbec, a relatively new wine for ABC. 

This wine is value priced and very good, with flavors of cherries and plum that you expect from an Argentine Malbec.  However, when I took a sip of Elm Tree with the marinara—WOW!!  I tasted vanilla caramel!  And I don’t mean "a little" or "kind of"— I mean… WOW!  I don’t normally have vanilla caramels with marinara, but this was great!  I was amazed, as I have never had such a dramatic change in the taste of wine and food.  My wife had the same experience when she tasted the Malbec with the marinara.  At the end of the meal, when
the marinara was gone, the last of the Malbec was back to cherries and plum and I started thinking that there was something going on here.  Maybe it had something to do with molecular pairing?

Mike McMinn, Wine Consultant at Store 130