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Written by Tanith Tyrr   
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Showcasing Fine Wines

There are a few tricks to showcasing fine wines in your cooking. One is "don't cook wine very long". Or if you must cook it long to get a low volume reduction, as in when you are doing a demiglace, cook it separately in a nonreactive saucepan or enamel skillet. Cook it down slowly, never allow it to come to a boil. Generally, the older a wine is, the less it will take to such treatments as hard reduction. Great but still young, tannic reds take very well to hard reduction (by 1/2 or more) and then the addition of some demiglace or mirepoix, as will an intensely charactered Chianti, Barolo, Pinot Noir or Sangiovese. The more powerful a wine is to start with, the better it will take rough treatment with heat in the cookpot.

Assemble the rest of the sauce ingredients requiring long cooking first, and marry them down by simmering, perhaps with a lesser but similarly charactered wine, until they are close to perfection and you are ready to add the finishing touch of the glass of great Bordeaux or Burgundy or the lush Sauternes. If the wine is old and fragile, actually turn off the heat on the sauce just before you add it. The sauce will be alcoholic. Warn your guests; some may be allergic, or have religious or personal objections and prefer to abstain.

OK, so how do you do that trick anyways?

The most important factor in showcasing truly great wines in a sauce or a braised dish is not something that can be quantified as simply as cooking time or temperature. You need to taste the wine and carefully choose the ingredients and textures that will marry with the wine, emphasize, echo and fully support its complex flavor structure.

I have had great luck with using black truffles to support great Bordeaux, Oregon white truffles to underscore a savory Cabernet or Pinot, veal demiglace to complement a fine Burgundy and light but flavorful fresh meat and root vegetable mirepoix to support the richness of most of the fine white wines that retain some acid. A Sauternes is a trickier balancing act to cook with, and I usually try to pair it with either foie gras, sweet blue cheese or a lush fruit-based dessert with some dairy.

Four elements of what the ingredients and cooking process must do will determine whether the final product carries the character of the wine you started with: marry, emphasize/echo, complement and support.

To marry the wine with a dish requires a basic canvas to work with that unites all of the elements of the dish, and that all those elements be in balance and harmony with one another. Stock or demiglace is one good canvas or overall theme if you are working with a meat sauce. Dairy is another. Tomato is another, but don't use a high acid vegetable like this unless you have an unsubtle, tannic, high acid red to showcase. For a more fragile red or a white, base your sauce on a mirepoix of more subtle root vegetables instead, avoiding more than a bare touch of wine-hating celery and onions.

Echo, echo, echo!

To more closely recreate the original tasting signature of the wine in its ideal state, you can add ingredients that help bolster, underscore or even replace some of the key elements of the flavors and aromas you want to keep. Is this a cheap trick? Sure. Does it work? You betcha.

To ensure you can continue to taste the wine in its final form, you should select ingredients that emphasize and echo elements that are already present in the wine. It seems simple, but it isn't—the charm some wines is that they have a complexity of flavors and aromas that just don't work if you try to put them together any other way. So choose to highlight the elements of the wine you aren't sure will survive otherwise, and only those elements that really are highlights. Overkill is not good.

If that tawny Port has a deliciously nutty aroma that you want to recapture in a sauce, and the simmering kills it, a handful of ground pecans in the sauce added towards the end can resurrect it deliciously. I have revived the rich, forward blackberry fruit components in a luscious Zinfandel I made into a sauce by—you guessed it—tossing in some blackberries. It's a matter of finding what tastes you enjoy in the original glass of wine, and making those tastes happen in a similar combination and balance in the sauce.

No, you won't have a sauce that is as good to drink as the original fine wine. You will have a sauce that will complement and echo that particular wine very nicely indeed, and which will have some of the similar flavors and aromas that made you enjoy that wine in the first place. If you are very lucky or very skilled, you may even achieve a similar level of complexity and developing tastes in the sauce as you might find in a glass of very good wine.

Complement is what you do, compliment is what your guests will do!

Some ingredients don't taste like anything in the wine, but they will nicely complement it. Traditional wisdom on wine/food pairings will help you here. This is where you should start thinking about textures as well.

No ingredient in a dish should overwhelm the wine. The other ingredients should be quieter than the wine you are trying to showcase, designed to support and buoy the central ingredient rather than overpower it. A touch of something in the onion family—a bare touch—can do well by a good tannic red or a crisply acid white, but it should be a short grace note to support the structure of the dish rather than a loud clamor. A more fragile and subtle older wine needs the savoriness toned down so that its more complex but fainter savor can be discerned more clearly. Go easy on the salt and use freshly ground black pepper only if it seems merited, after the dish is complete.

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