A Place at the Table

Still-life, Pieter Claesz. 1641. The Hermitage, St. Petersburg
Wine has been an integral, if not always necessary, element of many of the world’s cuisines for a very long time now. Those intrepid proto-vintners of the Caucasus, the Georgians, assert that they’re working on their 8000th vintage, give or take a happy hour or two.
 

Evidence exists that the Chinese were in the game as far back as 3000 BCE, a millennium or so earlier than the first documented fermentations in the Nile Delta. Wine was a ritual beverage at the courts of the great cereal empires of the ancient Near East for ages before eventually being driven underground by Arab conquests there.

Ancient Greeks and Romans serve as  the direct antecedents of modern Western wine culture, but it’s worth noting that in some respects their practice differed markedly from our own. Wine was almost never drunk neat but always mixed with water and generally consumed after, rather than before or during meals, at male-only soirées. The sterner sort of Roman husband thought it improper for his wife to drink wine at all.

If we define cuisine as a more or less durable socially-constructed schema for preparing and consuming  food, the places we assign to various comestables assume importance. Some examples (drawn from our own culture) might be (i) that the sweet course marks the end of the meal (we call it dessert); (ii) that a salad may be positioned as a first course and thereby function as an appetizer, or make its appearance after the main course as a kind of palate-cleanser; (iii) that a proper  main course requires a starch, a vegetable, and a protein (or at least 2 out of 3).

You might jump up a level and observe that behind these conventions are some even more basic elements: that the cuisine in question actually recognizes such things as appetizers, main courses, palate-cleansers, and desserts.**

Like a language, a cuisine has a grammar that may be fun to bend and even occasionally transgress, but which from day to day enjoys the status a familiar and stable schematic . It seems fair, then, to ask where wine fits into all this. What is its proper place at the contemporary table?

I know at least one person — the former director of beverage programs for a notable Boston restaurant group — who maintains that wine isn’t something to be considered outside the context of a meal.  In his view, wine’s sole reason for being is to busy itself with underscoring impressions made by food.  In other words, wine’s role is similar to the cuisine category we usually refer to as condiment.

There’s merit in this, I think, especially in the notion that it’s wine’s job to offer interludes of variety and refreshment to a meal. One reason it’s possible to reduce wine to this subsidiary role is that in our day wine is no longer considered  to make either a significant contribution to nutrition or to aid in digestion, as once was the case. Stripped of these employments wine may be less formidable in some respects than formerly. But is it fair to reduce it to the level of ketchup or wasabi paste?

An alternative approach is championed by my old friend the Burgundy expert. His idea is that wine is really a thing apart, something whose various features are best appreciated when considered on its own. In this view, food is a kind of distraction that may be tolerated when the wine in question isn’t anything very special, but not when something truly fine is in the glass.

This is more radical than the condiment idea since, if adopted, it would go some way to weaken the longstanding links between wine and food. Though, in the way it hearkens back to the post-prandial elbow benders of Plato’s time, it’s got some history on its side.

Put to it, I’d have to check the box marked ‘none of the above.’  I’m not comfortable seeing wine banished from the table, which I tend to see as its natural habitat. Nor do I think we can relegate it to the wholly subservient role of condiment, even if it often performs some of the same duty.

My inclination is to see it as one more element of a meal, as if it were another ingredient, dish, or course.  Yes, wine can provide both harmony and counterpoint and I expect it to play nicely with whatever else is on the menu, but not in a way that’s essentially different from how all the components in a thoughtfully-prepared meal interact.

I haven’t done any polling, but I would wager that this is the way many chefs see it, even if they don’t articulate it. Given technology that makes it economically viable to offer diners small individual pours, it should by now be  unremarkable to see wine leave the glass and move onto the plate, so to speak — as in “the pork loin is served with roasted new potatoes, a concassé of fresh native tomatoes and a three-ounce pour of Rosso di Montalcino.”

We’re not there quite yet.