The Medicinals of Food and Wine

Indian cuisine benefits from its native climate by allowing for the great variety of spice. This allows an Indian dish to have a directly medicinal property. Not only yogurt, but the elements of curry come to mind, anti-inflammatory substances such as turmeric and cayenne and ginger. Such cooking tastes good because it's very good for you, rich with bright anti-oxidants and the like, and also because it settles well with you. Curry curry curry. Cures what ails you.

In comparison French cuisine and all its ingenuity seems based on, as its wine is, the terroir. Good stuff comes from the earth. The cow eats the alpine meadow grass and herbs and you can taste it in the cheese, full of good microorganisms. The heat of the south allows for 'garrigue,' the dust that moves in the wind, really referring to the wild herbs that grow like dandelions there, rosemary, lavender, thyme. Olives go well with garrigue, as do capers, and basil. Such herbs too are good for you, anti-inflammatory, good for the blood and not without calming aromatherapy. Wine too is a product of the environment, that includes all the animals and the geologic history of a place, the DNA, if you will, of all creatures and things that grow and live in a region.

And so, if you are cooking crusty boneless pig's feet in a mustard sauce, you might serve a wine appropriate to the terroir of mustard, a wine that, like a red Burgandy, comes from not far away from Dijon. Or, if a dish has olives and capers and basil, maybe go with a spicy red from the South. Eating shellfish? Go with a wine whose roots go down into chalky soil, the remnants of sea shells from the geologic past, such as a Sancerre or a Muscadet. Or, maybe it's simply a dish famous in a region, like cassoulet, which will team well with a wine that comes of rain water that fell down near Carcassone, carried up by the roots to nourish the fruit.

Burgandy, by the way, lies along a venerable trade route from the East. Perhaps it is by some magic that the pinot noir that grow there are versatile and adaptable to spice. Lovely pinot noir, so sensitive, an imitator, impressionist, varied and versatile, and when a beautiful one is aged, drinking it is indeed like drinking from magic waters of earth and mineral and almost nothing in the way, just a little fruit, a little body, a little acidity and alcohol, to match.

God makes the wine, they say. We just let it happen and don't mess it up, they believe.

Good wines, like good people, are subtle. They are often from old vines, deeply rooted, balanced in their making. They are like the salt of the earth, and it would be a pity if they were to lose their individual savor. Take a wine from Paul Mas, down in the Languedoc, a Clos de Savignac, a beautiful wine hinting of piney scrub and juniper; you can almost smell the bees buzzing around on a hot day. Subtle wines, as opposed to the big thick high alcohol fruitbomb red or the overly oaked chardonnay, are of course delightful for food pairings. What you want basically in a wine is a craft of nature. Let the wind come through the vines, let them be dappled with sunlight. Let cool breezes from the waters come at night and cool them. Let them grow in poor soil on a hillside, that their roots must go down and down to gain their sustenance.

Why is it that duck goes so well with a Bordeaux, a Marguax (the softest of the Left Bank) to be exact? The duck would love such an estuary as the environs of Bordeaux, where vines grow on drained swamp land, reflective of the silt and dried mud that a duck might enjoy. As is nature, a chef is a poet, telling the story of nature. The onions and peppers and carrots which grow beneath the field the cow would graze on, it's all as if someone were telling us something, and the result of all that put together, just tastes very good. A poet must do the same.