Las Vegas Weekly

Great Steak Challenge takes challenge out of wine pairing

While most people would say you shouldn’t drink white wine with steak, Jerry Comfort, Culinary Director for Beringer wines, would beg to differ. Though the world of sommeliers can be quite intimidating, Comfort simplifies wine pairing to a do-it-yourself experiment.

Comfort was in Las Vegas during the Fourth of July weekend for the Beringer Great Steak Challenge. The regional event pitted 10 backyard grill masters from Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico against each other in a competition of their grilling and wine-pairing skills.

Catherine Wilkinson of Prescott, Ariz., turned in the winning steak, a T-bone she rubbed with black pepper and rosemary and served with fig butter containing Roquefort cheese and salt. Wilkinson’s next stop is Napa, Calif., where she will compete in the national grill-off judged by the Deen Brothers, progeny of butter-loving cooking queen Paula Deen.

For those who aren’t bound for fame as the next big steak star, the Great Steak Challenge also offered tips for the common wine drinker after the grills were turned off.

Comfort’s first rule of thumb is to pair wines to taste, not flavor. Flavor is the use of all of your senses while taste is what your tongue actually recognizes — saltiness, sweetness, bitterness, sourness and the elusive umami, which is the Japanese term for savory.

Wines also can be divided into five categories: sweet whites, dry whites aged in oak, dry whites not aged in oak, softer reds with fewer tannins (coming from seeds and skins of grapes) and medium to stronger reds with more tannins.

To simplify this basic rule of wine pairing, Comfort conducted a tasting with a 2009 Beringer California Collection Moscato, a 2007 Beringer Founders Estate Merlot and a 2007 Beringer Founders Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. The first step was to taste the wine with a clean palate, as the winemaker intended.

Beginning with a sip of the moscato, the tongue tastes sweetness almost exclusively. In order to illustrate the concept of saturation, where a certain set of taste buds becomes overwhelmed and blocks that taste, Comfort had participants taste an apple before returning to the wine. Because the apple’s sweetness saturated the sweet taste buds, the wine tasted a lot drier and less sweet. Conversely, sipping the wine after licking a sour lemon made the sweeter notes of the wine come through even stronger.

The same test was conducted on each wine, with the same result. Comfort’s final experiment stressed the importance of seasoning food. When he combined apple, lemon and salt before sipping a wine, the effect produced very little change in the taste of the wine.

“What matters is seasoning and saucing,” Comfort said, explaining that when a dish has balanced seasoning with proper salt, citrus and sweet components, it will not alter the taste of wine much. Thus, a favorite wine could go with just about any well-seasoned dish because the wine still will taste like itself.

As for grilling tips, the veteran chef stressed the importance of proper seasoning and tempering of meat, the use of a hot clean grill and the method he calls “chasing the juices.”

“When you grill, you have steam and gravity working against each other. Those crossed marks in restaurants aren’t just pretty, the chefs are chasing the juices, turning the steaks to combat steam and gravity.”

This also holds true for the resting period. Flip frequently. And when you do, make sure you have a glass of wine in your other hand.