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Resource Thu Aug 13 2009
Days of Wine and Codes
Wonder no more about which wine to serve with the gazpacho you just whipped up in your blender, or the (grass-fed) beef marinating in your refrigerator. Chicago-trained and Omaha-based Master Sommelier Jesse Becker has just launched a wine-pairing search engine and iPhone app.
The web site, which is easy to navigate using little illustrations of nearly every concievable food group, including offal, dark fish, light fish and legumes (sadly, no soup category), leads users through a series of questions about the heaviness of the food, the cooking method and cuisine. This generates a selection of wines to pair with your food, with the most "agreeable" matches in larger type. If there's a wine in the list of matches that's not familiar, you can click on the wine and get a description. For example, when I searched wines to match legumes cooked with Indian spices, one of my choices was Silvaner. WinetoMatch informed me that this is a white grape from Alsace and Germany's Franken region, and that it's usually dry, light and soft. Right Bank Bordeaux and Merlot were also good matches.
Becker and the algorithm aces at Consulting Merengue, a southern California software developer and web publisher, are already busy building updates (and perhaps a soup category). They acknowledge that wine-matching advice and charts already exist online. But theirs is the first attempt by a Master Sommelier to create such software. "Rather than developing an application which pairs a finite number of named dishes, such as Veal Parmesan or Bouillabaisse, we designed a robust software engine that pairs any conceivable dish," says Becker. The questions about weight and spiciness are the same ones sommeliers would consider when helping guests in a restaurant.
