IN RESTAURANT REVIEWS, WINE IS CHOPPED LIVER
Because Food People Know Less About Wine
Than Wine People Know About Food
By Alan Goldfarb
Jan. 26, 2024
I’m sick of it, I tell ya! After having scrolled through 2½ months of the L.A. Times’ food section, I didn’t see one mention, not one article, not one picture, not one tasting note. Nothing about wine.
Damn it! I’m tired writing about why it is that in almost every restaurant review in every newspaper and magazine, there is hardly any mention of wine? Is wine chopped liver?
Whatever the hell happened to the notion and the practice of pairing wine with food? To my mind, wine & food are inextricably linked. You can’t have one without the other. I don’t hardly eat a meal without wine. I don’t like to stand up and sip wine at a cocktail party. I want my wine with food.
And I know the reason why you might gag on your food in a restaurant without having a wine to wash it down. It’s because restaurant reviewers as a species don’t know much about wine. Wine is another skillset and another discipline. Everybody eats food. Not everyone drinks wine.
Which has led me to conclude throughout my long career: Food people know less about wine than wine people know about food. We wine folk study food as much as we do wine. Our raison d’être is to achieve affinity with food; to pair wine with food. We know what it takes to strike a pleasing balance between a sip of wine and a bite of food. And we have a pretty good idea which food and/or wine will tip that delicate balance.
At best, restaurant reviewers give short shrift to wine when writing about food. The color of the walls are more important than the color of the wine. And we all have heard for years, the rumor on the street of the then well-known veteran restaurant critic who – to his credit, had a sidebar about a restaurant’s wine program. But he didn’t actually write about wine(!); farming it out to a wine-knowledgeable friend, although the reviewer’s byline was at the bottom of the wine box.
Why, over the last 10 years or so, cocktails and beer have gotten more attention than does wine? Is it because booze and brews are easier to understand and therefore more familiar? If that’s the case, and I believe it is, we have continually failed at educating the consumer about wine.
Sure, when we begin to tell about wine we almost always say something like wine is really just fermented grape juice and there’s nothing to be intimidated by. I myself, when I began writing a wine column in 1981, had a credo that my purpose was to “demystify” wine. Which I understand now, naively suggested that wine is indeed mystical.
We want it that way, too. We want to keep wine mysterious, unknowable and even unreachable. We love the narrative of the perception of romance and sexiness surrounding wine. But at the same time, we talk out of the other side of our mouths of how simple, easy, and familiar wine is. It’s just grapes.
Well it’s not, really, save for those wines that have been commodified.
Price points don’t seem to be the problem any longer, either. How many $100 tequilas and mezcals have flooded the market recently? Maybe the reason wine has always had a sustainably tough time jumping to the forefront of the drinks business is that it lacks a punch; a big kick from alcohol. Fourteen percent, fifteen percent? What’s that compared to 45 percent alcohol that aforementioned spirits boast?
But I digress. The reasons wine is often overlooked, ignored, put down as elitist, have become inexplicable to me; especially among the middle of the modern economic and social strata. I concede that I don’t know how to penetrate that iron curtain. Maybe I’m not smart enough. But I don’t think anyone else has the knowledge to break through either.
So then, let’s just keep it to ourselves (and therefore tangentially making it elite). We then can be secure in the knowledge that perhaps we know more than the average joe and jill (with tongue only half-embedded in cheek). They’re the ones who’ll be missing out. Which means more wine for us.
Selfish? I don’t think so. I can sleep at night knowing I tried.