Learning about food and wine from the experts – Beer, Wine & Spirits – Column

“Once a wine maker puts a cork in the bottle, he can do no more with it. Then it’s up to the chef to put that wine together with a meal, making the dinning experience complete.”
Napa Valley wine producer Jack Cakebread made that observation in a recent lecture at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y.
But Cakebread wasn’t telling the CIA students the whole story. He and many other progressive wine makers in California stretch their job descriptions today to help chefs, teaching them about wine and the ways it works best with food.
Robert Mondavi has been bringing great chefs to the vineyards for more than a dozen years. Beringer has been running its Winery Training Seminar Series for almost the same period and also conducts a graduate chefs program under the direction of Madeleine Kamman. Fetzer does the same for chefs and management at its Valley Oaks Food and Wine Center, as does Chateau Ste. Michelle and Columbia Crest at their Stimson Lane headquarters outside of Seattle. There are variety of such programs in wine country, all aimed at spreading knowledge of wine in addition to cultivating alliances with customers.
It all helps sell the product, from winery to distributor to restaurant to consumer. Chefs and managers, who may know the food and business side, welcome the opportunity to learn more about wine, not to mention spending a few pleasant days in sunny California.
Cakebread’s American Harvest Workshop is approaching its sixth birthday. The sessions in early Autumn bring chefs, managers, food producers and writers to Cakebread cellars for three days in the fields, visits to farms and food sources, along with tasting wine and working together in the kitchen. “The whole business of food and wine,” he said, “is not in harmony if the chefs are stuck in their kitchen, the wine makers in the winery and the farmers down on the farm. Things work better when they know more about each other.”
On his sales trips Cakebread says he saw chefs who were adept at food and wine matches but noticed that few thought seriously about such pairings until after the dish had been prepared. So he made food and wine compatibility a foundation of the three-day seminar.
After mornings in the vineyards or at oyster farms or sheep ranches, all located within a few miles of Cakebread Cellars in the southern stretch of Napa Valley, chefs are given a list of available foods and wines so that they can plan dishes designed for specific wines. The food preparation period, coming after morning in the fields, is short, seldom more than two hours before dinner, so that the kitchen can often be hectic.
There were eight chefs on my visit – Mark Ehrler, then with San Ysidro Ranch near Santa Barbara; Ken Frank of La Toque, Los Angeles; Christopher Gross of Christopher’s, Phoenix; Hubert Keller, Fleur De Lys, San Francisco; Mark Millitello of Mark’s Place, North Miami; Mark Rodriguez and Clair Epting of Jordon’s Grove in Maitland, Fla.; and Melina Teo of the Draycott Wine Club, Singapore. They’d do the planning and the actual cooking while the rest of us, along with invited guests, did the preps, the copping and paring, meat cutting and other semiskilled jobs.
Millitello welcomed the opportunity to meet food producers and work with other chefs. “We – Clair and I – watched and tasted everything we possibly could. We picked up a lot about techniques, and from the flavors in the kitchen you could see what the chef was working toward. Learning how other people think and put wine and food together was very helpful.”
Gross appreciated the wine education, something he’s strong on at his restaurant in Phoenix. “We don’t sell anything we, and that includes all the waiters, haven’t tasted ourselves. To sell wines, you have to be comfortable with them, and the learning process is always ongoing.”
“The fact that we got to meet these suppliers and learn how the food is produced,” Millitello added, “gives us an important tool. It’s like a guy selling a car. If he knows how it is built, that makes him a better salesman, and the same goes for cooks. This crash course gives us that much more of a competitive edge.”
For Cakebread it’s one more step in selling through. For the trade wine-country courses like the Harvest Workshop are one more step in an education that never ends.