Book Review: Wine & Dine At Home: Easy Recipes & Perfect Pairings
There have been moments where I have experienced a weird dread while standing in the wine shop, holding a bottle of wine with a name I am most certainly mispronouncing in my head, wondering if it is an insult to the meal I’m about to prepare, and whether or not it’s a reasonable hedge against humiliating myself with the soon-to-be assembled dinner party. It’s not a wine problem, really, but a confidence issue. It’s exactly the sort of problem Charlotte Kristensen’s Wine & Dine at Home aims to solve.
The book’s structure is the first clue that someone in charge understands how humans behave, which is to say: poorly, constantly under deadline pressure, with strongly held opinions on garlic and newly formed opinions about soccer. The book is arranged in three movements: Discover, Pair and Curate. This may sound like an agenda for a forced corporate retreat but in practice, it is a very forgiving syllabus. “Discover” lays out the fundamentals of food and wine pairing without intimidating the novice reader wishing to learn more. “Pairing” gets down to the nitty-gritty, with fifty wines and recipes varying in complexity: you should definitely have more than a passing knowledge of how to make a meal that isn’t one involving a microwave. However, there’s a section for those culinarily deficient later in the book (more on that in a second). Finally, “Curate” zooms out into thematic, full-course menus for the rare and blessed occasion people are arriving at your house on purpose. There’s also a quick detour into “Takeout Night,” providing those who are not quite up to snuff in the kitchen yet with a quick and easy alternative, and also hopefully avoiding the risk of food illness from something being undercooked.
One of the things that makes Wine & Dine tick so well, and gives it a bit of distinction, is that Kristensen writes like someone who actually wants you to enjoy your dinner, not just survive it. She refuses to give in to the practice of treating wine pairing as if it is some code to be cracked by people with excess disposable income. There’s an unpretentious joy running throughout. There’s zero interest in making the reader feel bad that they’ve been pairing anything and everything with Pinot Grigio out of habit; Kristensen is more interested in showing the reader that there might be something interesting going on one aisle and two shelves over, and that “more interesting” is a perfectly suitable reason to try something. That is a wildly countercultural position in a world of wine writing focused around the principle that pleasure must be earned through toil, suffering and a working knowledge of the soil composition in the mountains of Mendoza.
The pairing logic is explained, rather than declared as gospel. This matters because the entire proposition of this book is to teach the reader how to reason their way to a decent bottle at the shop or supermarket, while this book stays on the bookshelf or kitchen counter at home. That’s the actual gift here: not the fifty recipes, but the method of generating the 51st and 52nd one on your own, on Thursday evening, with guests arriving in under two hours’ time.
If there’s a drawback here, it’s the same uniform complaint that could be made about any genuinely good hosting book, which is that it can make the reader feel more ambitious than the actual kitchen, schedule, budget or skill can comfortably support. And you may find yourself building a five-course evening centered around right-bank Bordeaux for what was supposed to be burger night with one other person. But that’s really not a flaw, either. It’s an unlisted side effect of enthusiasm that is transmitted with success, which is the entire job of this sort of book.
This is the kicker making Wine & Dine succeed at the only task that matters for a book of this style: it makes you want to go buy a bottle of something you’ve never tried before and cook it next to something tonight for no particular reason other than just to see what happens. That’s not just wine education, that’s a good time. Just organized in a slightly more intelligent fashion than usual.
A- / $27 [BUY IT NOW FROM AMAZON]
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