Hitting all the right (taste) notes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/08/2017 (3349 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Pairing wine and food isn’t really that hard. There are the tried-and-true general guidelines you can follow — that old chestnut “white wine with white meat, red wine with red meat” comes to mind — but you can also play with pairings, combining dishes with wines whose flavours complement or contrast.

But what about pairing wine with music? When Interstellar Rodeo decided to start up an annual festival in Winnipeg in 2015, they asked me to be the festival’s “wine curator” — to pair a featured wine with each of the artists. It was initially a bit of a head-scratcher. I love both, but wine and music don’t even go into your body in the same place — how do you pair them?

I started by checking out what had been done at Interstellar Rodeo’s Edmonton festival, which started in 2012. There, local wine guy Gurvinder Bhatia had done (and continues to do) the wine pairings for each artist, with brief descriptors of artist and wine, and a rationale as to why the two belong together.

The wines for the Winnipeg festival are sourced from three of the private wine stores — Banville & Jones, Kenaston Wine Market and The Winehouse. Since the start I’ve worked with folks from those shops to try and pull together a fun, accessible collection of wines.

Sometimes the pairings have been almost immediately apparent, and sometimes they take a whole lot of thinking, listening and tasting. Last year I really sweated over the wine paired with Wilco, the Saturday headliner and one of my all-time favourite bands. I wanted something that was relatively approachable but that retained some complexity — kind of like their songs — and I tasted plenty of wines before landing on the winner. I went with Domaine Le Roc La Folle Noire D’Ambat, a natural red wine made from an obscure grape in a not-very-well-known region, but that was decidedly delicious.

There are factors to consider beyond how a wine might pair with an artist’s music, some of which I learned about the hard way. For example, the first performer of the first year of the Winnipeg festival was Hawksley Workman. I had paired him with a charming, rustic Ontario Cabernet-Merlot blend called Canadian Gothic that totally suited his charisma and theatrics. However, his set started around 6 p.m. and it was 30-plus C in the blazing sun on that Friday — not exactly the ideal weather for a heavier red.

Availability is another wild card. There have been a couple of times where I’ve tasted a wine and thought it would make a brilliant pairing, only to find out the wine’s not available in sufficient quantity.

And one of the biggest shifts I’ve made over the three years of Interstellar Rodeo wine-and-music pairing is sheer logistics — choosing wines bottled under screwcap (which, thankfully, isn’t that limiting anymore). Wines bottled under cork are tougher and more time-consuming to open, which gets annoying when you’re pouring wine for large numbers of people. There’s also a greater risk of a wine being off; every time I choose a bottle with a cork closure, I have to check every bottle to make sure the wine’s correct.

The full lineup of wines for this year’s Interstellar Rodeo are available now on the festival app, but you can taste the wines paired with each of the headlining acts at The Common at The Forks right now. Their Interstellar Rodeo flight features three two-ounce glasses of the headliner wines: the Ortas Rasteau Tradition (a red from the Côtes du Rhône region of France, paired with Father John Misty); the Alta Alella Privat Garnatxa (a red from Spain’s Catalunya region, paired with Beck); and the Adi Badenhorst “Secateurs” Chenin Blanc (a white wine from South Africa’s Swartland, paired with Broken Social Scene).

 

CONTEST: Want to win tickets to Interstellar Rodeo? Send your best wine-and-music pairing (any wine, any artist — they don’t have to be performing at the festival) and a short rationale or reasoning to me by email by Thursday, Aug. 10. The two best entries will each receive a pair of weekend passes to the festival.

uncorked@mts.net Twittter: @bensigurdson 

 

 

Wines of the week

Here are some decent reds for backyard barbecues this August long weekend. Remember: if it gets hot, don’t be afraid to chill your red wine down for 15-20 minutes.