Try the Chocolate Cake
On a rabbit briefly, chocolate cake at length, and a small confession about FC and Champagne.
We promised you, last week, a piece on rabbit. We are not, in fact, going to give you a piece on rabbit. We need to be honest about this. The rabbit was the lure. We do not, as a matter of policy, hold particularly strong views on rabbit. Almost nobody does. The wine industry attached itself to rabbit somewhere in the late 1970s as a kind of all-purpose protein on which to demonstrate the eternal principle that Burgundy pairs with everything, and the rabbit, blameless, has been carrying that water ever since. We salute the rabbit. We will, in this dispatch, pair more useful things with more interesting wines. We are doing it now.
What you have been told, in roughly the same number of words for forty years, is the following. Chardonnay with chicken. Sauvignon Blanc with goat cheese. Pinot Noir with salmon. Cabernet with steak. Champagne with anything, provided it is also, technically, special. These pairings are not, broadly speaking, wrong. They are just not, broadly speaking, the whole story. The pairing chart was a thing somebody printed in 1984 to help a generation of newly enthusiastic home cooks feel confident about what to pour with what. It worked, mostly. It also, by the way, fossilized.
There is a story one of us tells, about a mountain. Roughly twelve years ago, at a particularly large wine and food festival in Aspen, one of our team — by their fourth consecutive year showing wines at the festival, they had been given the booth at, in fact, the top — was pouring an unoaked Chardonnay. They had also been handed, for reasons that have since been lost to history, a sheet of classic layered chocolate cake. They were told to pair them. They poured. They cut. They braced.
The result, on paper, was not supposed to work. It worked. Alarmingly. The first taker was a man in a fleece vest — Aspen, after all, where the fleece vest is approximately civic infrastructure. He looked at the cake. He looked at the Chardonnay. He said, with the certainty of a man who has eaten lunch at altitude many times before, that he did not, technically, think this was going to work. He was prevailed upon. He took the sip. He took the bite. The fleece vest, in any visible sense, did not move. The man did. He stared, briefly, at the cake. He stared, briefly, at the glass. He looked back and said, very quietly: “Pour me another.”
From there, the booth did not stop. Strangers approached. They took a sip and a bite, looked briefly confused, took a second sip and a second bite, and stayed for a while. Some of them came back. Some brought friends. The booth, at the top of the mountain in Aspen, became, for that weekend, the booth that was somehow doing the chocolate cake and the Chardonnay. We have been quietly recommending the pairing ever since. It does not, we should say, survive significant oak — there is a lightly oaked version that almost works, but the unoaked is the one. We do not know why this works. We know that it works.
We do not know why this works. We know that it works.
This is, in fact, the small lesson. The pairing chart is a starting point. It is not a constitution. A wine pairs with a thing not because the chart said it would, but because, in the glass and on the plate, the balance happens to land. Sometimes the balance is acid against richness. Sometimes it is sweetness against salt. Sometimes it is a contrast you cannot, on paper, defend, that arrives as a surprise on the palate and feels suddenly right. Stop trying so hard. Open the bottle you want to drink with the meal you want to eat. If the bottle does not work, open another one. You have done worse things on a Tuesday.
While we are here, a short list of pairings we would, with some confidence, send you home with. They are, by any reasonable measure, defensible. None of them are rabbit.
Pork dumplings and a lightly chilled Pinot Noir. The dumplings carry fat and umami. The Pinot carries acid and a slight savory edge. They meet in the middle. You will see what we mean approximately halfway through the second dumpling.
Fried Chicken and Champagne. We are not joking. We do not particularly care that you thought we were joking. The fat of the chicken, the salt of the breading, the chill and acid of the wine — it is, on a Tuesday night, alone in your apartment, one of the great American luxuries available to people with kitchens and a slight tolerance for chaos. Sommeliers have been quietly doing this for thirty years.
Cold leftover Pad See Ew and an off-dry German Riesling. The Riesling’s sweetness meets the soy. Its acid cuts the noodle. The bottle does not, in any meaningful sense, judge you for what time it is, or for whether you are sitting down.
That is, for today, the list. We will not include rabbit. The rabbit, in fairness, has been doing fine without us.
Vinly, briefly. We do not, on the platform, tell you what to eat with your wines. We sell the wines. Eating, as it happens, is your jurisdiction. We trust you with it. If a bottle from this week’s drop ends up next to the leftover dumplings — and there are a few in the cellar this week that no chart on earth would have paired with leftover dumplings — we have no notes.
A pairing, in the end, is two things meeting on a plate and deciding to be kind to each other.
— The Sesh Architect (and the booth at the top of the mountain, in spirit) vinlywine.com
NEXT DISPATCH · COMING MONDAY
“A fight about decanting.”
Next time we look at the decanter — the glass sitting on every serious dinner table — and ask the question nobody quite wants to ask: does it actually do anything, or does it just buy us forty-five minutes of looking like we know what we are doing? Bring a wine you have always meant to decant. Bring a wine you have, by accident, decanted for too long. Bring an opinion. Or borrow one.
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