Hold The Steak, Pour The Cabernet

What on earth do you pair with grilled zucchini? As cuisine becomes more vegetable-forward, top chefs and sommeliers are asking that very question.

- Ted Loos

Within our dining culture, we have evolved our habits to drink big red wines with meat. Hearty, juicy, red meat. Satisfying bottlings made from grapes such as cabernet sauvignon and syrah are flattered by a steak or a lamb chop—and, of course, they make the food look good, too. It’s a mutual admiration society.

Just pick up any bottle of, say, a Rhône-style blend from Paso Robles. Somewhere on the back it will recommend pairing with lamb or beef. We also welcome ‘big wines’— meaning ones with copious amounts of tannin and alcohol— onto our tables partly because we think, “Oh, eating meat while we drink will neutralise those drawbacks.”

But as high-end cuisine veers away from meat, how do we shift the way we match food with those big reds we’ve come to love? After all, it’s not just an issue for vegetarians. Many of us are putting vegetables at the centre of our plates more and more, for reasons from our health to the environment. And as Laura Fiorvanti, the owner of New York’s wine-centric Corkbuzz restaurants, puts it, “vegetables are, on their own, the hardest thing to pair with wine”.

It was a lesson on display some time back, when I had two multicourse dinners at the famed Michelin three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park in New York City. Two weeks apart, the meals came just after The New York Times panned the newly vegan cuisine at the restaurant, in a review that the food world was talking about for months; even the cringey headline said that renowned chef Daniel Humm “does strange things to vegetables”, making it sound more like a police report than a culinary critique.