Vine points

Trinchero Family Estates in California's Napa Valley, runs one of the most innovative wine education courses in the world.

When I asked 10 pub chefs if they knew what their pub's best-selling wine was, not one of them knew.

Most pub chefs probably create their menus without sparing a thought for how the dishes might match the wines on their pub's list. Equally many licensees build their wine lists without considering the style of food or dishes on their menu.

But at the Trinchero Family Estates wine education centre in St Helena, in the Napa Valley, California, USA, kitchen collaboration between chefs and wine experts is seen as a natural partnership. The winery has its own culinary centre and three winery chefs and runs an innovative wine and food pairing and wine education course called Vine to Dine.

Your pub may have an awesome wine list, and you might feel very smug about some of the more unusual wines you offer and the fact you have the best chef in the pub industry. But to make them a "Fred & Ginger" partnership, both licensee and chef need to understand how the flavours in a wine will change the food.

If you want your customers to spend more per head and return to your business, then surely your aim, to quote the wine-themed film Sideways, is not to give them something above a "quaffable but not transcen-

dental" wine to match their food.

Barry Wiss, senior director of education and hospitality for Trinchero Family Estates, which produces wines including Sutter Home White Zinfandel, says: "Chefs need to get more involved with the person in charge of the wine list. The first thing you think about is food, particularly in

a food pub, and wine should be built around this.

"In the past it has been the case that the chefs take care of the food and I will take care of everything else."

Many pubs are now running successful monthly or weekly wine-and-food evenings, where the menu is matched to a selection of wines from a certain region or country. But licensees and chefs should also be thinking more broadly about how their menu works with their wine list.

Even if your menu changes daily, if you know how certain styles of wine affect

different dishes, then wine staff can make

a more informed recommendation to the customer.

Barry was responsible for establishing the Vine to Dine programme, a creative, interactive and inspiring wine education course. If school was this fun everyone would want to go back. The courses are free of the snobbery you might associate with wine training and demystify food and wine. The staff working on them are almost evangelical in their passion for wine and food and the produce available in the wine country, and their passion is highly contagious.

The non-traditional classroom setting for the courses can be the winery's own culinary centre, the vineyard, local farmers' markets and San Francisco's Chinatown.

A matter of taste

One of the seminars on the Vine to Dine course is food-and-wine pairing, which was led by one of Trinchero's full-time winery chefs James Houghton. At Trinchero, they believe much of the conventional wisdom on food and wine matching is misleading. This presentation demonstrated that taste, balance, texture and flavour are the keys to a successful food-and-wine marriage. We learned how to utilise the basic tastes of sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami (the recently-discovered fifth sense of savoury taste) to bring food into balance with wine. The results were eye-opening.

James focused on how the tongue's senses have a knock-on effect on the taste of wine.He used three wines to show how basic sweet and sour tastes in food react with different grape qualities. These were a White Zinfandel, a Sauvignon Blanc and a tannic Cabernet Sauvignon. They were tasted on their own as a control, and then again after a bite of a slice of sugar-coated apple, and following a suck on a lemon wedge, to see how these flavours affected the flavours of the wine. This is probably the first time in my life that sucking on lemons was a valuable experience.

The impact of a sweet flavour made the Sauvignon Blanc, in particular, less sweet and the wine bitter and dull. Not a good match, therefore, for desserts and sweet and sour dishes. The Cabernet Sauvignon was made fruitier and smoother by acidity, while the lemon had a calming impact on the Sauvignon Blanc.

The rule of thumb when matching is to ensure your wine and food mirrors each other. "If you serve a very acidic red wine, such as Barbera," Wiss explained, "you would want to balance it with a food that is also high in acid, such as a tomato sauce. If you pair the same tomato sauce dish with a low-acid wine, the apparent acidity in the wine would be very low, making it appear flabby and lifeless." The same applies to dessert wines and puddings - match sweet with sweet. If anything, make the "sticky" sweeter than the dish.

Aroma wheel of fortune

There wasn't a poker chip in sight when our group gathered around a roulette wheel to play a novel game called the Aroma Wheel.

More than 90% of our sensory perception of wine derives from its aroma. Wine consists of 200 chemical compounds similar to those found in fruits, vegetables, spices and herbs. We actually smell flavours as well as tasting them.

In this session we learned how to define wine aromas, understand off-aromas and develop an aroma vocabulary to identify and discuss wines and their characteristic aromas. The wine vocabulary focused on was very user-friendly. *TO ADD HERE*

After an introduction by Barry Wiss outlining the principles of "primary, secondary and tertiary aromas" and the properties which cause wine to be corked, the group was divided into two teams and the wheel-spinning commenced.

The session is based around a roulette wheel with a difference - with unmarked phials encapsulating different aromas found in wine attached to each section of the wheel.

Each group took it in turns to spin the wheel and, when it stops, the group must try to identify the smell in the phial. These included essences of fruits, spices and cork taints, among others.

This challenge really got your sense of smell working and thinking about how to identify the different aromas in wine.

Pure genius.

Tongue Fu challenge

This session showed us how to identify the key tastes in wine - sweetness, tannin, alcohol and acidity.

We were given five glasses of wine to identify by taste only. The same wine was used as a base for each sample, but four were doctored, to illustrate the base tastes, while the fifth was an unaltered glass of "control" wine. Points were awarded for correct identification.

Blending your own wine

One of my most enjoyable sessions of the course. Working with the five primary Bordeaux red grape varietals - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Vedot and Malbec - and using funnels, glass jars and measuring tubes, we worked our magic to blend our own wine.

A Napa Valley Meritage consists of a blend of two or more of the Bordeaux red grapes. To make a traditional Medoc or Meritage wine, Cabernet Sauvignon should be the base of a blend.

I blended Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot, which was then bottled in the classroom, with the group each designing the label for their wine. I found Jo's Juice, which I enjoyed back on home soil - a well-balanced, fruity and cheeky wine. But I don't think you will be finding it in a branch of Oddbins anytime soon.

Italian passion

The Trinchero family, like many of those who established the Napa Valley's wineries, were Italian and the Trincheros are still very much involved in the business, with Bob Trinchero the company's chief executive officer. As Barry says: "This is still a mom and pop winery."

Many of the sessions on the Vine to Dine courses are interactive and this session, called the Staples of the Italian Kitchen, led by Susan Smith, had us identifying and

tasting staples of the Italian kitchen, which are produced in the wine country.

Our session focused on herbs such as bas