The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago ran an interesting profile of a man it called “the wine antisnob.” His name is Tim Hanni, and his story is certainly fascinating: A leading wine expert, he has been a recovering alcoholic for more than a decade.
For my purposes, though, the more significant point is not his story but his attitude, this so-called wine antisnobbery.
Let me begin by making the point that I welcome wine antisnobs–I came close just now to saying I love wine antisnobs—because without antisnobbery how can one properly define snobbery? It is something like the old philosopher’s paradox that by denying God you admit that He exists. I believe Tolstoy also said something to the effect that without death we would not be able to define the meaning of life, but I’m not sure I trust Tolstoy on that one. By the end of his life he was a big-bearded scold.
I want to deal with just one aspect of this wine antisnob’s active career. In addition to launching a consulting company, WineQuest, the name of which has a certain Holy Grail aspirationality to it, Hanni has resolved the knottier issues of wine and food pairing with a practical—one might also say radically practical—form of kitchen chemistry: fundamentally this relies on the addition of balancing or neutralizing agents like salt, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese. He even has developed a condiment, Vignon, that is meant to accomplish this with a few shakes of the bottle.
This approach, I have to say, is not one I embrace with any enthusiasm, that I regard coldly. Because my own simple, ringingly concrete solution to a food that does not go with a certain wine is to a) change the food or b) change the wine. But for heaven’s sake don’t herniate a disc trying to bridge the gap. Why bother with détente or glasnost or whatever? Have a glass of water between your bites of food and your sips of wine. Or stick to water altogether while eating the wine-challenging food. That, the Journal notes, is the traditionalist approach, which might also be denoted the Vivosian approach, except that the Journal did not contact me for the article. Instead we have the approach that could be called Hannian. The article notes that you can drink a light wine with steak—did I hear “yuck,” anyone?— by squeezing lemon juice on the steak , salting it, or drizzling it with Bernaise. Well, what if you shouldn’t consume salt or Bernaise? What if your blood pressure and cholesterol level are already elevated up to the height of a scary high ridge and someday your heart might go plummeting over the edge?
Or what if you plain don’t like lemon on your steak? Have you ever offered a cow a lemon? They don’t like lemons, either: You are adding insult to injury squeezing lemon juice into its cooked remains.
Why not go with a heartier, deeper red—the wine that does the job and has done so for centuries?
Now, a little chemistry is not a bad thing at all, not at all—Aldo with great pride can recite something called Avogardro’s number that he learned when he was off in his Austrian boarding school and his father was running around the Continent selling rich ladies fraudulent vitamins derived from monkey parts. He especially likes to reel the number off with company present . No one hears him anyway. He sits there smiling to himself and moving his lips and counting infinite digits on his pudgy ringed hands.
It was Aldo who suggested we test at least one suggestion of Mr. Hanni’s, as reported in the Journal: Asparagus is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to pair with white wine (the artichoke is possibly even worse). It regards wine the way a porcupine does a cat: Gets its spiky back up. With wine, aspargus tastes metallic and, as Aldo once put it, like a marsh grass that has wandered into a French kitchen. And the wine reciprocates, spitefully, by losing its deliciousness. Mr. Hanni’s solution: Lemon juice and salt.
This sounded plausible to me. And, besides, lemon juice gives a wonderful lightening touch to asparaus. Aldo and I poured ourselves a 2006 Inama Soave Classico for this experiment. With plain steamed asparagus, true enough, food and wine were unpleasant – that familiar awfulness blossomed that makes me think of the aroma and taste of water from an old drinking fountain. But Mr. Hanni’s trick worked fairly well: With lemon juice and a little salt, the asparagus maintained its asparagusy flavor in the mouth, as did the wine its light floral and citrus notes. The clash was resolved.
In the end, however, this experiment did not produce actual harmony of wine and vegetable, which means that aesthetically it was a wash. This was not yin and yang – the flavors were not integrated. They merely shook hands across a fence running down the middle of my tongue. They might be called neighborly.
And since I am a wine snob, what is the good of that?
