California Dreamin' competition: Taste match special

There is good wine, and there is good food. Put the two together and you get a great meal. However, acquiring the knowledge and skills to do so successfully can seem daunting to a young chef - and to some not-so-young ones. Let's face it, most kitchen maestros leave it to their sommelier to do the matching - and most chefs, anyway, draw up menus without even considering their restaurant's wine list.

But at Trinchero Family Estate's residential education centre, Sutter Home Victorian in St Helena (in the USA's wine heartland of Napa Valley) and its adjoining purpose-built culinary centre, they preach and teach a different mantra: collaboration between kitchen and wine experts is the order of the day. And last October, I found myself heading Napa-wards in the company of 23-year-old chef Amy Ballin to experience this philosophy first hand.

Let's rewind a bit. Ballin, who at the time was second chef at the Wycliffe Centre in High Wycombe, was the winner of Caterer's California Dreamin' competition last autumn. The prize was a five-day trip to Trinchero's education headquarters to take part in a tailor-made course designed to give her basic wine knowledge and food-and-wine pairing skills.

The trip kicked off with a stunning flight into San Francisco over the famous Golden Gate Bridge and continued to take in some impressive scenery as we bowled along the road to St Helena, through hillsides plastered with serried ranks of Napa's most planted grape, Cabernet Sauvignon ("they're all so perfect" Ballin commented).

First-up on the education front was a lively seminar teaching the skills of recognising wine aromas through a novel game called the Aroma Wheel of Fortune. Dreamt up by Barry Wiss (Trinchero's senior director of education and hospitality, who also led the session) this set the tone for the whole course. That was: learning presented as fun - with a bit of healthy competition thrown in for good measure.

After a brief introduction going through the concepts of primary, secondary and tertiary aromas and a whiz through those that constitute the main "off" whiffs (we're talking acetic acid, brettanomyces and tricholoranisol - aka corked - here), we were divided up into teams. At this point the wheel (a bit like an over-sized roulette wheel) came into play. This is how it works: a series of "blind" phials around its circumference - containing essences of tree fruits, spices, sulphur and cork taints, among others - have to be identified by contestants through smell alone after they have each spun the wheel.

Ballin proved to be a bit of a natural, with a pretty good nose. "I didn't know how easy it could be to begin to understand wine by using the senses you already have," she commented.

Other interactive sessions that followed underlined her observation. One that delved into the importance of the palate in wine tasting, was fetchingly called the Tongue Fu Challenge. Another let everyone loose on blending their own wine using the five red Bordeaux grapes (Ballin's vino experiment, incidentally, comprised half Cabernet Sauvignon, a quarter Merlot and a quarter Malbec).

These all built up towards the most useful seminar for Ballin, which took her through the basic principles of pairing food with wine. Led by one of Trinchero's full-time chefs, James Houghton, it touched on the how the tongue senses sweet, sour, salt, bitter and umami tastes and how these, when present in food, have a knock-on effect on the taste of wine.

In classic tasting fashion, Houghton used three wines to show how basic sweet and sour tastes in food react with certain grape qualities. These were a strawberry-noted white Zinfandel, a grassy and gooseberry-ish Sauvignon Blanc and a berry-strong and tannic Cabernet Sauvignon. They were tasted on their own as a control, and then after a bite of sugar-coated apple, and after a suck on a lemon wedge.

The exercise proved illuminating. Sugar, for instance, made the Sauvignon Blanc, in particular, less sweet: it became bitter and dull on the palate (not good, then, with desserts or even sweet-and-sour combinations would be the assumption). The Cabernet Sauvignon was also destroyed by sweetness (becoming quite horrid, in fact) but made fruitier and smoother by acidity; while the lemon had a quelling, almost dulling effect on the Sauvignon Blanc. "It was the most eye-opening bit of the matching exercise and I really think something similar should be included on chefs' training courses," Ballin remarked.

The rule of thumb when matching is to make sure your food and wine mirror each other. "If you serve a very acidic red wine, such as Barbera," Wiss explained, "you would want to balance it with a food that is also high in acid, such as a tomato sauce. If you pair the same tomato sauce dish with a low-acid wine, the apparent acidity in the wine would be very low, making it appear flabby and lifeless." The same applies to dessert wines and puddings - match sweet with sweet, if anything make the "sticky" sweeter than the dish.

Good matches with spices and cheese were also discussed. High-alcohol wines, it seems, do not work with spice and chilli because these food flavours accentuate tannins, turning the wine into a nasty, bitter glug. Oak-aged wines should be avoided, too. Low-alcohol wines, in contrast, are good pairings - something with nice fruit and floral aromas get a big red tick. Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Champagne and Pinot Grigio would all work well. (This point was proved again at a dinner cooked by the Trinchero chefs, which teamed a dish of coconut milk and kaffir lime-poached lobster tail with Thai red curry and lemon-infused advocado oil, alongside a Montevina Pinot Grigio 2004. It was a great pairing.)

Fascinating as the seminars were, Ballin's Trinchero course wasn't all seminar-bound. Classroom or culinary-based sessions were interspersed with trips round the company's St Helena winery to see the wine-making process at first-hand, as well as visits to local Napa restaurants. Then there was a day out in San Francisco's Chinatown, culminating in a lunch at the Slanted Door, the city's leading Vietnamese restaurant. It is located in the newly restored Ferry Building with its parade of artisan stalls and shops (chocolates, cheeses, wines, vegetables - everything you care to think of) and a bi-weekly farmers' market.

"I'm having such a good time and learning so much, I don't want to go back to England," Ballin, only half-jokingly, admitted. Unsurprisingly, she left California fired up with a determination that she would return to work there, either in Napa Valley or San Francisco. Watch this space.

Cheese and wine There are certain parallels between cheese and wine. Both have varietal characteristics and are influenced by the soil and climate they stem from (well, cattle eat grass, which is affected by growing conditions).

• Creamier cheeses high in butter and fat coat the tongue and that means that big red wines with strong tannins are wrong as a pairing. Try fruity, acidic wines such as Sauvignon Blanc (a classic goats' cheese match). Or a jammy, smooth port with blue cheeses such as Stilton (we were given a Montevina Zinfandel Port from Amador County - a perfect partner).
• Drier cheeses with less fat and higher salt content (Grana Padano, Parmigiano, pecorino) have a higher acidity and are best with red wines.

The Tongue Fu Challenge A central module of the Trinchero Vine to Dine programmes, this game shows how to identify the key tastes in the structure of wine - sweetness, tannins, alcohol and acidity.

Contestants have five glasses of wine to identify by taste only (no sniffing allowed). The same wine is used as a base for each sample, but four have been doctored (some very subtly) to illustrate the base tastes, while the fifth is an un-doctored control glass of wine. Points are awarded for correct identification - and it's not as easy as it sounds.

Trinchero Trinchero Family Estates is the fifth-largest wine company in the USA. Its portfolio includes the premium Trinchero Family Selection (produced from estates in Napa, Monterey and Santa Barbara) and embraces top-end boutique wineries such as Montevina (located in the Sierra foothills) and Folie à Deux, as well as Sutter Home Winery ranges such as White Zinfandel.

White Zin was developed in 1973 by Bob Trinchero, now chief executive officer of the company, and has been the bedrock of its current success. Sutter sells nearly five million cases a year.

Six years ago the company set up its Vine to Dine education programmes in St Helena. Masterminded by Trinchero's senior director of education and hospitality, Barry Wiss, they are aimed at hospitality professionals, front-and back-of-house, and are based on a series of interactive modules, which can be adapted and to suit students'/clients' needs.

www.trincherowinery.com, bwiss@rfewnes.com; Tel: 00 1 707 963 5928