Food and wine matching – a new approach

Chances are you have, and this, in turn, may have led you to determine that taste is a matter of personal preference. As the old saying goes, there is no accounting for taste. This being the case, you may consider efforts to address the dynamics of food and wine to be somewhat frivolous, and you certainly wouldn’t be the only one to think so. I, however, beg to differ. About 10 years ago, I came to the realisation that what we needed was a new approach that would give us the answers we need in order to understand the essence of flavour and the practice of pairing food and wines. In developing this new approachs it became clear to me that we have traditionally looked at the issue from the wrong perspective. The new insights I have gleaned will help us to understand the complex world of flavour in general, and offer exciting possibilities to the wide world of food preparation in all of its many guises. They constitute a part of what we now refer to as ‘flavour theory.’

New concepts
The new approach demands new concepts. A central concept of the new flavour theory is the ‘flavour profile.’ In order to understand what this is, we must first define what we mean by ‘flavour,’ and that, in turn, can only be understood in relation to ‘taste'. Taste is one of the five senses with which humans are endowed. People have the capacity to taste the flavour of foods and drinks. As one of the five senses, taste is profoundly linked to the other senses. Our tongue, nose and eyes are all involved in the act of tasting, thus taste is inextricably bound up with the senses of touch, smell and sight. Once we have placed ‘taste’ into this human context, we can move on to say that ‘flavour’ is the counterpart of taste. Where taste belongs to the taster, if you will, flavour is exclusively associated with the food products themselves. All foods and drinks have flavour. Flavour can be broken down into a number of separate elements: the gustatory element, the olfactory element and the tactile element. This definition of flavour is broader than that supplied to us by most standard dictionaries, and while this may seem confusing to some, to me it is a natural consequence of looking at the matter closely.

A conscious awareness of the distinction between taste and flavour is very useful. Taste, being linked to humans, is by definition a subjective concept. People have different capacities, experience and culture and they experience taste in their particular environments. This will necessarily influence the registration of flavour, but it certainly doesn’t influence the nature of the flavour itself. Compare this to the idea of colour. The colour of a given object will remain steadfast, even though it may be experienced differently by individuals with varying degrees of visual ability. In fact, flavour is objective. Any trained professional will acknowledge that. To avoid subjectivity when defining a flavour, the tasting of the food item in question must be undertaken by a team of tasters.

Once all of this has been established, we need descriptors: parameters or rather concepts that can be used to describe flavour. In the field of physics, frequency (hertz) and intensity (decibels) are the parameters used to describe the phenomenon of sound. In the field of flavour, ‘mouthfeel’ and ‘flavour richness’ are the parameters we use to help us define flavours.

Mouthfeel
Humans are, from birth, highly sensitive with regard to mouthfeel. There is no flavour without mouthfeel. It can be defined as: the human perception of the texture of food or beverage in the mouth. Mouthfeel covers all tactile experiences, including texture, thermal effects and chemical influences of acids, salts, minerals, metals and irritants. Mouthfeel is closely related to food appreciation. Toasted bread that has lost its crispness will have lost much of its appeal as well. In the process of winemaking, wine growers will traditionally counterbalance a highly acidic wine by adding alcohol or residual sugar; otherwise it will develop into an unappealing wine. As a tool to aid us in describing particular flavours, mouthfeel can be subdivided into two categories: contracting mouthfeel and coating mouthfeel.

First subcategory: contracting mouthfeel
Acidity and saltiness play an important part in the composition of many foods, and trigger a contracting response in the mouth. The papillae on the tongue register the presence of acidity and saltiness; this is experienced as tactile ‘tingling’ or ‘stinging’ impressions. The acidic wine will have a ‘contracting’ mouthfeel, as will the freshness of a green salad, citrus fruit, apples, and pickles. No wonder such wines go well with salads and other fresh foods. Frozen substances such as can be found in ice cream also trigger a fresh and tingling oral sensation. They have a rinsing, refreshing influence in the mouth. In fact, the pores located in the mouth contract to bring about this effect. The more extreme tactile reactions produced by CO2, menthol, raw onion, mustard, ginger, horseradish and some peppers are similar to the reactions triggered by milder foodstuffs, but they are very different from a chemical and physiological point of view. The common denominator is that all of these food substances trigger a contracting, prickling or stinging feeling.

In addition to the effect just noted, contracting mouthfeel may also be characterised by dryness in the mouth. Foodstuffs that easily absorb saliva can cause this: a dry biscuit, a crispy, fresh crust of bread, potato chips, some meats and nuts. The drying (roughing, puckering) effect in the mouth caused by tannins (red wine) and other bitter tasting elements (as in coffee, tea or unsweetened chocolate) is also characteristic of contracting mouthfeel.

Second subcategory: coating mouthfeel
Creamy, fatty substances and those containing a significant amount of dissolved sugars coat the mouth. In other words, they leave a layer of fat or sugar behind. These substances also influence saliva by making it thicker. In beverages, alcohol and sugars are viscous, coating elements. They coat the mouth, and this coating may influence the way in which the mouth perceives the next mouthful of food it encounters. Proteins also produce a coating mouthfeel, especially amino acids and some chemical substitutions like gelatin.

Contracting mouthfeel and coating mouthfeel are capable of neutralising each other. Oil (coating) and vinegar (contracting) are mixed together to get a well-balanced vinaigrette. Alcohol and/or residual sugar (coating) balances/neutralises the acidity (contracting) of wines. A dry slice of toast (contracting) will neutralise a slice of smoked salmon (coating). The fattiness of that smoked salmon may also be neutralised by teaming it up with lemon, raw onion or horseradish, all of which trigger a contracting mouthfeel.

Flavour richness
The decibel and the lux are units of measure used to plot sound and light intensity, respectively. Flavour richness is their counterpart in the field of flavour. As with contracting mouthfeel and coating mouthfeel, flavour richness can be scaled from low to high. The level of flavour richness can be classified by regarding the flavour type. Flavours that are characterised by the fresh, fruity, acidic tones of lemons, apples and menthol are called fresh. Such flavours are easily associated with spring and summer. Primary fruit flavours in general are often fresh, as are herbs such as chives, parsley, chervil and mint. Fennel, leek, raw onion and raw peppers are examples of vegetables that bring freshness to dishes.

As flavour richness increases, ripe flavour tones are likely to increase. Consider the changes that occur in the flavour profile of a potato depending on whether it is boiled, pan fried or deep fried. Frying or grilling meat or fish shows how flavour intensity rises, while the flavour type changes to ripe. This is also true of onions and peppers that are roasted in the oven. Other examples of food ingredients with ripe flavour tones are mushrooms, caramel and vanilla. In winemaking, the process known as barrel ageing will bring about differences in flavour style, giving such wines a ripe character, just as ageing does. In many cases flavour intensity and ripe flavour tones rise with the level of preparation, leading to higher levels of flavour richness. Pure and non-prepared foods are likely to be lower in flavour richness.

Flavour profile
Foods and drinks can be classified with the three above-mentioned parameters. Contracting mouthfeel, coating mouthfeel and flavour richness can all be scaled from low to high. The three-dimensional model below is called the flavour styles cube.