Pairing wine with food is a bit of a sport to me. Since successful pairing is just as much an art as a science, there’s a healthy dose of educated guesswork involved. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail – sometimes spectacularly. But with each pairing, I get a little better.
This year’s New Year’s Eve dinner presented one of the more difficult challenges I’ve faced in the wine arena. Our evening’s theme was based upon a meal that was served in 1882. My job was to pair each dish with a suitable wine. It actually seemed pretty easy until my husband reminded me that I needed to stay true to the theme – the wines needed to be of the type that would have been widely available in 1882. There went all my familiar California and Oregon
The most difficult dish was a medium rare steak. The obvious choice is a young-ish California California was in its infancy in 1882, and I’m virtually certain that there was no export business in wine from California
