Day One - On the Road with Oregon Bounty (A Wine Snob Re-educated, Part II)

September 27, 2007

Today we begin our “On the Road with Oregon Bounty” journey in Portland, a place well known for its food and wine. I’ve hung around a lot of chefs and winemakers in my time, and have a pretty good handle on food and wine pairing. There are the basics: you can go for a complement (the earthiness of Pinot noir goes great with mushrooms) or a contrast (a sweet wine to balance a salty dish), etc. Go a little deeper, and you realize the red-with-red-meat/white-with-fish dogma is rather constraining if not downright boring.

Food and beer pairing? Now that’s another story… one that requires me to digress. You see, beer and I go way back, to my teen years.

My dad drank beer, if you could call it that. It was cheap, light, and had a flavor profile best described as ‘mild compost.’ It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized his choice of beers was strategic: even though a bottle or two highjacked from the spare fridge could mean quite a buzz for a 15-year old, he knew we’d never touch the stuff.

In the late 1980s, while working at a Portland PR agency, I was assigned to work on the account team of an old Portland brewery. They were a local institution, although by then their star was fading in the face of ownership turnovers, national competition and America’s evolving beer palate. I never told them: a) I hated beer, and, b) the reason I hated beer was because my father’s brew of choice years before was – you guessed it – a beer formerly produced by their brewery.

My beer-turnaround occurred a few years later, about the time a guy named Dick Ponzi – whose family has taught me a thing or two about wine over the years – helped start the craft brewing industry in Portland with the founding of Bridgeport Brewing Company. This was beer in a new light. Beer now had flavor, nuance and character. It also made phenomenal business sense.

I’ll never forget being with Dick and his wife Nancy at a dinner in New York and hearing his take on the difference between the economics of fine wine and beer.

With wine, you plant a vineyard, wait five years for it to mature, and pray that the ground you chose produces good grapes. Then, if the birds don’t clean out the clusters and there are no major rainstorms at harvest, you make wine and stick it in a barrel for a few more years. If all goes as planned and the varietal you planted seven years earlier is still in vogue, you just might be able to sell it for more than it cost to produce.

With beer, you roast some grain, throw it together with a little water, yeast and hops, and a month later you have beer. Then you start the process all over again. Ok, maybe I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point: there is a little more risk and romance with wine. And that’s what I love about Dick. He could have gone for the sure thing, but decided to sell the brewery years ago and stick with wine.

Even as I’ve watched what the growing craft brewing industry has done to give beer a place at the culinary table, I still remained somewhat of a wine snob; beer lovers were second-class citizens dressed up in slightly nicer clothes. Well, I’ve learned that there’s more to being a dedicated “hophead” than just bringing a $10 six-pack to the tailgater. I have friends who are just as ardent in their study of beer as I’ve been about wine. Chefs cook with it, match food to it, and host beer dinners with every bit as much art and science as they’d put into a menu paired with old Oregon wines.

Day one of this road trip was a great lesson for me, provided by one of my favorite chefs in Portland: Pascal Sauton of Carafe. We’ve worked together for years on various wine events, but this journey was all about opening a new beverage door for me. Don’t let the French accent fool you…Pascal is actually from Belgium and they know a thing or too about beer. Pascal loves his suds, and he’s not afraid to cook with them. Take a look at today’s video and you’ll see what I mean. And, if you’d like to taste some special once-a-year beers created by Oregon’s best brewers, check out the Oregon Bounty Fresh Hop Beer Tastivals.

See you tomorrow!

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Comments (1)

Nino Marchetti:

A great start to your video series!

Posted by Nino Marchetti | September 27, 2007 7:05 AM

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