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Y ou think of steak, you think of wine. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, but not (and sometimes way messier). Not just any wine goes with any steak, however, and after choosing your preferred cut, you are next faced with finding the right vino. To be sure, when pushing your cart through the wine section, there is nothing wrong with reaching for a bottle of your old standby. If you take nothing else from this article, let it be this: Wine is for everyone. Don’t let wine— or wine snobs, real or imagined—intimidate you. I’ve drained an awful lot of bottles with kangaroos on the label, and the best wine, as they say, is the one that’s in your glass. But there is a reason wine, unlike, say, orange juice, has for centuries mesmerized drinkers. For one thing, it goes better with breakfast. But for another, the right wine can turn a plate of food into a culinary adventure. Note that the very premise of this article might be flawed, however. There is no reason to choose your steak before the wine. When I was a young student, I had a professor say that there are two sorts of people in the world: those who buy art to match their sofa, and those who buy their sofa to match their art. Wine is no different. What goes on in the bottle transcends vintage (i.e., the year printed on the label). Some wines—particu- larly those from the “old world” (France, Spain, Italy—anyplace once part of the Roman Empire, basically)—are grown in soil that has been cultivated for a thousand years. You are literally drinking that effort. Wine, in other words, need not be the supporting player; it can be the main event. Regardless of the order you choose—steak then wine, wine then steak—the question remains: Which wines go with which beef? To answer this question, I reached out to Julie Joy, the director of beer, wine and spirits for Rouses Markets and a twenty-year veteran of the trade. She said when choosing a wine, there are some basic practices to get the perfect pairing, and that the two most important things to keep in mind are marbling and seasoning. “The world of wine is built on balance,” says Joy. A fine wine, for example, balances acidity and fruitiness. Too much fruit yields a “flabby” wine. Too little, and a wine that is “thin.” Both can be fun to drink, but if you choose to refine your palate, you will invari- ably begin to seek out a complexity beyond

READ BETWEEN THE WINES By David W. Brown

whether it is simply quaffable. “Just as you want a balanced wine, you want a wine that balances your meal—especially when it comes to really great cuts of meat.” The rule at its most basic: if you choose a steak with more marbling (which is the fat in a steak), then you don't want a full, overdone red wine. The “big red wine” and a boisterous steak such as a ribeye will fight each other in the mouth and overload the senses, much in the way that too much icing can turn a great cake into an unpleasant chore. Instead, the discriminating wine buyer should look for a wine with more tannins and acidity. (Tannins are what give wines that dry, astringent feeling in the mouth. Sound unpleasant? It’s not. Tannins are the reason coffee is so satisfying, but not exactly the first drink you reach for after stepping off the treadmill.) Getting down to specifics, you would not pair a ribeye steak with a heavy red blend (i.e., a wine made with multiple, overly expressive grape varieties) or with a Bordeaux (the famed wine region of France best associated with Merlot), or with a spicy Zinfandel (a grape variety that yields a full- bodied, sometimes “jammy” wine that is grown very successfully in California). Instead, the best wines for ribeye—the most marbled steak you are likely to find— include bottles of syrah (which is exactly the same thing as shiraz, both named for the same grape), grenache (a red grape), and some lighter red blends. These are bottles with just enough weight to compete with the steak, but not so much that they overpower it. In other words, wines that bring balance. Another option for the ribeye and its marbled brethren are Italian wines, generally, which are excellent food wines from an excellent food culture. “Italian wines are lighter in general,” says Joy. “Not all of them, of course—but something like a sangiovese, the primary grape grown in Chianti, is a great choice.” Rouses sells a wine called Toscoforte, bottled by a family called Guicciardini, who have been doing this for 900 years and thus have some idea of how to make a good wine. “Toscoforte has complex aromas and fruit in a robust body, but it has really great tannins,” says Joy. “It’s the tannins that will cut through the fat.”

PHOTO BY ROMNEY CARUSO

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