Wine Dinners
Written By: Brian Freedman on Fri, Aug 31st 2007
Now that Labor Day is almost here, I find myself looking at my calendar for the next several months, trying to squeeze in as many wine dinners as possible. And as summer rolls into fall, there are certainly no shortage of them to choose from. I’ve always believed that the more of these evenings of wine and food you can attend, the better. Even if you’re not in love with the region from which the wines will be poured, the benefits are immense.
There are, indeed, few better ways to really understand wine, to really wrap your mind around how certain bottlings will act in the real world, than at a wine dinner. Tastings, of course, are fantastic: The wide-view picture they provide is invaluable, especially if you’re either in the wine business or making a concerted effort to taste as many different kinds of wines as possible in order to better grasp the world of wine in its entirety.
But the truth is that most of us don’t drink wine under real-world conditions the way we do at tastings. A swirl, a sniff, and taste, and a spit are wonderful ways to begin the process of experiencing a wine, but to really know one, you have to savor it over the course of several mouthfuls.
At wine dinners, you will often only taste five or six wines, which more than makes up for its limited breadth of selection in the depth of understanding you’ll gain of the wines that are poured. The opportunity to study a wine sip after sip, and to see how it evolves in your glass, is far more beneficial—for most people—than going from booth to booth and having a sip of several dozen wines in relatively quick succession.
The other advantage of wine dinners is that you’ll have the opportunity to see how the wines work alongside food. And not just any food: The specifically and carefully paired dishes will often frame the wines in ways you could not possibly have imagined had you simply tasted them on their own. And no matter how prestigious the producer, no matter how exquisite the bottling, the vast majority of wines taste infinitely better and more interesting when enjoyed alongside a dish that was conceived specifically to be enjoyed with it.
Just make sure you do your research before signing up for every wine dinner you can find. There are, after all, some real dogs out there, and the last thing you’ll want to do is spend all that money on a dinner hosted by a mediocre chef whose run-of-the-mill preparations are paired with equally uninspiring wine.
The good ones, however, are extraordinary. The interaction between a delicious wine and a creative chef’s food has the potential to change the way you look at wine and food pairings. And as long as both the producer and the restaurant are worthy of your attention, there are few better ways to spend your wine-budget money.
