A master sommelier extols the perfect marriage of food and wine

• The goat cheese, prosciutto and hummus test
• Raise your glass to fish with sake sauce

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Food Editor

ANDREA IMMER

But does your choice of wine to go with a meal always have to be perfect? After all, says Andrea Immer, "it's pretty unlikely anyone ever ruined a meal with the wrong wine choice."

In fact, she says, inching farther out on a limb, "most wine goes with most foods most of the time."

Such down-to-earth thinking is typical of a woman who says she never really understood buttery in chardonnay until, as a poor student, she sipped some with popcorn.

Though she moves in wine's stratosphere as one of 10 female master sommeliers in the world and dean of wine studies at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, Immer also has a young son at home and a workaday life to live. The only difference between Immer and the rest of us on a weeknight evening when you just have to get dinner on the table is that she believes the best "Tuna Helper" is pinot grigio, a light and tangy Italian white that is widely available, can be quite inexpensive and complements a variety of dishes from tuna salad to grilled or broiled 'ahi steaks.

She tells of a wealthy customer of hers who can afford dinner out every night, but who is also a single dad whose menu often is centered on Shake 'n Bake — except that he eats his with a glass of Mersault, a luxury burgundy, a pairing Immer unabashedly endorses.

Immer, the program coordinator for the Kapalua Food and Wine Festival, will be on Maui next month for that event, where she is looking forward to a special vertical tasting of champagnes and the chance to rub shoulders with her sommelier friends.

She knows that these folks have a reputation for making a complex subject more complicated through the use of odd terms and for intimidating people with insider traditions.

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Kapalua Food & Wine Festival July 10 to 13, Kapalua Resort, Maui Host: Andrea Immer Guests: Ming Tsai of TV's Food Network; DK Kodama of Sansei Seafood Restaurant & Sushi Bar Grand Tasting, Seafood Festival, wine-tasting seminars, culinary seminars, Kapalua Wine Tour, winemaker dinners Four-day admission: $750; individual events range from $50 for seminars to $130 for Grand Tasting and Seafood Festival grazing events, kama'aina discounts offered Program information and registration: (800) 527-2582; kapaluamaui.com/activities/ kwff.html About Andrea Immer: greatwinemadesimple.com

"Simplifying and dumbing down are two different things. I'm conscious of making it so that people can focus on the complexities without getting completely bogged down in them," she said in a phone interview from her New York office.

The genius of "Great Tastes Made Simple" is this: Immer starts with something most of her readers already understand well: food. Her premise is that we all know that certain ingredients make foods taste better — a sprinkle of lemon on a shrimp cocktail, melted butter on fresh corn, cracked pepper on a grilled steak. For the purposes of this book, wine is just another such ingredient — not something to put in the dish, in this case, but something to drink with the dish to enhance or elevate it.

"There's a characteristic that almost every wine possesses, which is acidity, and that's the thing that makes most wines suited to food," said Immer. "If you look at the way we cook and prepare any food, your tendency is to add condiments that have acidity — ketchup to a hamburger, lemon on a piece of fish — to bring up the flavors more. This is also a natural virtue of wine."

Immer is determined to rid Americans of the notion that wine is only a special-occasion thing.

"The first idea that needs to change is that wine has to be expensive to be good. I want to create a comfort zone that wines at value prices are absolutely worthy of meals," said Immer.

She offers three approaches to developing more confidence with regard to pairing wine and food:

• A series of detailed matching suggestions indexed at the rear of the book. Planning to serve a dish smothered with aioli (garlic mayonnaise)? Look up aioli in the index and the bold-faced number will take you to a page on which a grid offers specific suggestions for the family of dishes to which aioli belongs. Suggestions are given by color (white, red, rose), country of origin, grape varietal and specific winemaker. Even if you can't find exactly that wine, a wine shop expert will be able to suggest suitable alternatives. Her emphasis is on everyday, affordable wines except where the food in question (foie gras, for example) is a special-occasion, luxury dish.
• Suggested tasting experiments to help you become familiar with the characteristics of various wines and how they affect your favorite foods. For these "snacks with a purpose" — which actually might serve as dinner or a weekend lunch, she recommends specific matches that make a fine match or illustrate a particular point. Early on, she offers a bare bones introduction to wine tasting and tells you how to do a tasting of the six most popular grape varieties.
• A guide to using the wine label to predict a wine's likely attributes. This includes descriptive terms that are part of the wine's name (such as "riserva" "brut" and so on), facts such as the alcohol level or region of origin and — the most important single determinant — the grape variety.

"The grape variety is the easiest and most powerful concept in wine," said Immer. "Varieties can be your template for sorting out, comparing and remembering wines. For example, reisling as a grape on the label is pretty much always a slam dunk for matching with anything with some heat, like Asian or Mexican and so on. ... You just need some familiarity with the major grape varieties. It's just like a food: The first time you ate salmon, you didn't know what it was like but after you had it, you committed to memory the attributes of salmon."

Chapter Two of the book, "To Taste It Is To Know It," is the book's heart in which all the basic philosophy and instruction is offered; it's worth the price of admission in teaching how to detect the basic flavor components of wine. Flavor is the common theme of the remainder of the book, too: Each chapter is focused on a flavor type, rather than a specific food (earthy, smoky, buttery, tart, spicy, fermented and sweet), and on the wines that pair naturally with these flavors, as well as a few of her favorite recipes that exemplify the taste in question.

The goat cheese, prosciutto and hummus test

From left: Chianti, Shiraz and Fumé Blanc Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

First, taste the three wines alone. Then with the three simple foods.

Chianti

• goat cheese: Both assertive flavors become softer.
• prosciutto: Match showcases natural rusticity of each; wine's spice plays up chianti's meatiness.
• hummus: Spicy, earthy wine plays to garlicky, earthy bean flavor.

Shiraz

• goat cheese: This cheese pumps up the wine's berry flavors.
• prosciutto: Ham's saltiness pulls out wine's dried-spice flavors; bold wine emphasizes ham's chewy, fat texture.
• hummus: This pairing isn't the best; "partners just taste like themselves."

Fumé blanc

• goat cheese: High-acid combination actually makes cheese taste creamier, wine soft and supple.
• prosciutto: Wine's acidity balances ham's saltiness.
• hummus: Wine's soft fruit comes out, as does the nuttiness of the hummus.

Raise your glass to fish with sake sauce

This is one of wine expert Andrea Immer's favorite recipes, developed by chef Ed Brown when both were working at the Sea Grill in New York City. The two set out to show that their favorite wine, pinot noir, works well with fish. That's readily clear with fattier fish such as salmon, but Brown found that even lean fish could pair with lighter reds if the sauce forms the flavor bridge.

This is a sauce he created for grilled or pan-seared fish — but you can also use it with pork loin or chops, duck or chicken. A little of this intense and rich sauce is sufficient on the plate. Being a beurre blanc, the classic French butter sauce, this sauce is best made at the very last minute: Put the meat on to grill or pan-roast, start the sauce and it will be ready about the time the meat is done.

Ed Brown's Sake and Chinese Black Bean Sauce

• 5 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into 5 equal pieces
• 2 teaspoon minced garlic
• 2 teaspoon minced shallots
• 1 teaspoon fresh ginger, peeled and minced
• 1 tablespoons Chinese fermented black beans, rinsed and coarsely chopped
• 1 1/3 cup sake
• 1 tablespoon shoyu
• 1 teaspoon kecap manis* (thick, Indonesian sweet soy sauce; a Japanese tamari may be substituted)
• 1 teaspoon rice vinegar, approximately

In a small, non-reactive saucepan (stainless, enamel or Pyrex glass), melt 1 tablespoon of butter over medium-low heat. Add garlic, shallots and ginger. Cover and cook without stirring until translucent, about 3 minutes.

Add the black beans, sake and shoyu and mix well. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in remaining butter by tablespoons.

Add the kecap manis, and then the rice vinegar, gradually, whisking, until the sauce acquires a gentle tanginess.

Serve the sauce immediately over grilled or pan-seared fish or white meats. Serves 8.

* Kecap manis is available in some Chinatown and Asian stores.

Accessorize flavors with a matched wine

Artichoke and asparagus

These vegetables have a reputation for making wine "taste funny," but certain earthy, spicy, acidic wines can tame their taste-altering tendency: Ask at a wine shop for Austrian Grüner-Veltliner, Italian Vernaccia di San Gimignano, Italian Verdicchio, Italian Vermentino, dry French and Italian rosé wines.

Wine and tomatoes

Fresh, ripe tomatoes (when you can get them) are among what Immer classes as "wine-loving foods." She says almost any wine improves the taste of really good tomatoes. Here's her three-course wine-and-tomato "tasting menu":

Begin with fresh, ripe tomatoes and a plain, fresh goat cheese paired with Geyser Peak sauvignon blanc or BV Coastal red zinfandel.

Then move on to a quick toss of hot pasta (orecchiette or shells) with tomato chunks, salt, pepper and a drizzle of olive oil; pair this with Kendall-Jackson Vintner's Reserve chardonnay or Rosemount Diamond Label shiraz.

Finish with a fresh tomato and strawberry gazpacho made by whirling equal parts of peeled, fresh tomatoes and sweet, fresh strawberries with balsamic vinegar (1/2 teaspoon per cup of puree, plus sugar or honey to taste. Serve in teacups garnished with mascarpone cheese and fresh mint. This is also nice over grilled fish or shrimp as a salsa). Try this with Iron Horse Brut Rosé (sparkling) or Moscato, Familgia di Robert Mondavi (a lightly sweet wine with soft bubbles).

Coconut milk and sesame flavors

These dishes, from cultures that don't normally drink Western-style wines, can seem tricky to match, but Immer offers a range of suggestions:

• For spicy sesame and coconut milk dishes such as seaweed salad, green chili and coconut-steamed mussels, wontons in hot sesame sauce, spicy cold noodles with sesame sauce, and spicy coconut milk curries, choose German riesling kabinett and spätlese wines, which are light-bodied with tropical scents and flavors.
• For moderate to full sesame and coconut milk dishes, such as potstickers and dumplings, shrimp toast, sesame chicken, beef, shrimp or pork, satays, coconut-milk Thai, Indian or Caribbean curries, and salads with sesame-miso dressing, serve toasty chardonnays, tropical chardonnays or Viogniers (toastiness is a signature of many California wineries — just ask the wine purveyor to recommend a specific wine with full tropical-style flavor).

Earthy beans and wine

All manner of bean dishes are natural pairings with wines. Here's a brief guide:

• Soups: Tuscan bean with garlic, Yankee bean with bacon; split pea with ham; white bean with pesto and parmesan. Try these with everyday drinking wines from the Mediterranean, including Spanish whites, gewurtztraminers from the Alsace or southern French whites.
• Sides: Red beans and rice, refried beans, Southwestern black beans, Indian dals, Cajun dirty rice. Again, those everyday drinking wines are recommended, but also European rosés.
• Main dishes: Cassoulet, Brazilian feijoada, lentils and blood sausage, meaty bean stews; go for regional French reds such as Cahors or Madiran, Italian chianti or barbera, Chilian Carmenere, Spanish Priorat.

Shrimp and sushi

Both light-bodied shellfish and simple sushi are complemented by ripe-but-crisp wines with no oakiness, such as rieslings from any region and New Zealand sauvignon blanc (featuring tangy acid).