Tower of Power: A Chef's Perspective on Food & Wine Pairing

The stress and tension of a professional kitchen can sometimes make cooking seem like a life or death situation. After all, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when the dinner orders begin piling up on a Saturday evening. An extremely busy night is one of those occasions when, even though you do your very best to prepare for it, there is really nothing you can possibly do to avoid the onslaught. At best, you can stay just a half step ahead of the rush and have enough food to get through the dinner service. You finish the night exhausted, but with an innate sense of accomplishment. At worst, you become buried by tickets and bring the entire kitchen to a grinding halt. That’s the most helpless feeling in the world.

I will always remember the time when I was working the sauté line one busy Saturday night at Auberge du Soleil in Napa. It was at the height of the summer busy season, and the restaurant’s reservations were near capacity. The printer was already spewing out tickets four and five at a time, even though we had just opened the doors. As the orders kept pouring in, my flat-top was soon completely covered with sizzling sauté pans, and even more food was set out on the countertop waiting to be cooked. I could already tell that I was headed for a rough one. I was not only battling time, but also space. Clearly, the chef could see my concern as the tickets kept spilling out of the printer. He walked over to my station and told me, “Don’t worry -- it’s just food.”

The comment took me a bit by surprise. Auberge du Soleil had just received its first Michelin star a few weeks earlier, which automatically established a standard of excellence that each one of us in the kitchen wished to maintain. A Michelin star, after all, comes with the burden of keeping it. Here we were in the trenches on a Saturday night, completely focused on sending out perfect plates at breakneck speed, and the chef said it was “just” food? I wondered if I had possibly missed his intended sarcasm. But as I thought more about what he said, I realized that the chef was not being sarcastic at all, and that he was right. Sure, getting through a busy Saturday night could be challenging, stressful and exhilarating, but at the end of the day, it was just cooking. It wasn’t rocket science, it wasn’t open-heart surgery, and it certainly wasn’t life or death. In that situation, to view cooking as anything more complicated would only have been counterproductive.

I gained some valuable insight at that moment, and I like to adopt the same perspective when it comes to food and wine pairing. Whenever someone tells me that they have difficulty choosing a wine with dinner, I remind them that it’s just food. At the very least, if you only know enough to pair red wine with red meat, and white wine with white meat, you’re already in the ballpark. Of course, food and wine pairing is not quite as elementary as simply matching colors. But on the other hand, it really isn’t that much more difficult, either. When I was studying at the Culinary Institute of America, my Wines & Spirits instructor, Michael Weiss, helped develop a system that he and his colleague, Steven Kolpan, dubbed the Tower of Power. Based upon the differing characteristics of different wines, the Tower provides a framework for food pairing that yields surprisingly good results, considering its elegant simplicity.