I’The art of pairing food and wine is at the heart of the gastronomic meal of the French, listed since 2010 on the list of intangible heritage of humanity by Unesco. Art, the word is not too strong. All you have to do to verify this is to have the privilege of sitting down in a gourmet restaurant, one of those famous “starred” restaurants – triple, if possible – for the show to be complete. In addition to a renowned chef, there is a sommelier or sommelier of great reputation, sometimes the best sommelier in his region, in France, in Europe, or even in the world.
The height of his art consists in proposing for each of the dishes that make up a menu the most suitable wine, taking into account the aromas, flavors, textures, consistencies and many other small details kept secret, a bit like the magician who never reveals his “tricks”. The goal is to create harmony, a symbiosis between the dish and the wine. When a deal is struck, one plus one does not equal two, but three. A third taste dimension that sublimates the plate as much as the glass.
But, if French gastronomy and wines have always been a reference and have imposed themselves, each in its category, like the model of the genre, their meeting at the table with the prospect of a happy marriage is recent.
Watered wine
Shortly before Caesar’s conquest, in the time of Gaul not yet Romanized, the festive meal is very similar to that imagined by Uderzo and Goscinny in their comic strip on the adventures of Asterix: “The long-haired Gauls also feel a great attraction for banquets , during which they ate a lot while drinking cervoise, mead or, for the wealthiest among them, wine bought from Greek, Phoenician or Roman merchants who criss-crossed their territory. […] This distinction persists in France and in Europe until modern times: barbarians and drunkards drink pure wine, while eating or outside meals, civilized drinkers cut it with water, according to ancient usage, and drink it at the table” notes Jean-Robert Pitte, geographer specializing in landscape and gastronomy, in Food and wine pairings, a French art (CNRS Editions, 2017).
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Throughout the Middle Ages and until the end of the Ancien Régime, the poor were reduced to daily soup and, at best, pickles, while the privileged ate a variety of foods and drank wine, the best, watered down as a sign of good manners. “Therefore, it should come as no surprise that Louis XIV dilute his Vosne wine with water and Napoleon his Chambertin, adding ice if possible” continues Jean-Robert Pitte.
Brillat-Savarin, the father of food and wine pairings
At mealtime, however copious it may be, the wine is unique, white or slightly colored and in any case never of the color of the reds as we know them today. At the table of the kings of France, one drinks simply to quench one’s thirst. At the request of a guest, a servant brings a glass of wine which is then rested on a kind of sideboard. From the XVIIe century, wine is commonly used in cooking, especially white wine and champagne, but we do not choose the wine according to the dish. A use confirmed by the cooks of the time. François-Pierre de La Varenne who turns the page on medieval cuisine and announces in the book The Chef François (1651) the advent of “great French cuisine”, Pierre de Lune which delivers “the real method for preparing all kinds of meat, game, birds, fish, both sea and fresh water, according to the four seasons of the year” in the book The cooker (1656) or even the enigmatic LSR, author of The Art of Treating Well (1693).
However, it is necessary to wait until the end of the XVIIIe century and the Revolution to see real changes take place in the uses of the table, in particular the development of restaurants with a menu of dishes and a selection of wines, served on individual tables. The modern restaurant was born. The 19the century was also going to be a “golden age” for wine, the quality of which was to improve thanks, among other things, to progress in the field of winemaking. The wines, which are much more stable, can age in bottles and the wealthiest build cellars where we find wines from Burgundy, but also from Graves, Bordeaux taking on more and more importance, from Champagne, which we master better and better production, or sweet wines, such as Sauternes, and sometimes foreign wines, such as those from Madeira. Wine is then associated with celebration, conviviality and the ritual of the meal.
It is Brillat-Savarin (magistrate, gastronome and French culinary author) who, in his reference book Physiology of taste, published in 1825, sets the tone: “The order of drinks is from the most temperate to the most smoky and the most fragrant; to claim that one should not change wine is heresy, the tongue becomes saturated and, after the third glass, the best wine only arouses a dull sensation. » Each dish has its own wine, the service sparing the rise of flavors. By affirming this, Brillat-Savarin lays the foundations for pairings between wine and food.
In the footsteps of great chefs, birth of modern sommellerie
However, if, from one end of the XIXe century, the great names that punctuate the history of gastronomy are those of cooks, such as Antonin Carême (1784-1833) or Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935), great sommeliers showcasing wine, no trace, everything changes over time. middle of the next century.
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At the beginning of the 1960s, the highly publicized Paul Bocuse brought chefs out of their kitchens to make them stars. Some cooks will begin to take an interest in wines by promoting the vineyards of their region. Others will go further, considering that food and wine must be in perfect harmony. This is the case of Alain Senderens at Lucas Carton in Paris, the first to offer a menu with a glass of wine per dish, or Alain Dutournier at Carré des feuillants, crowned best restaurateur-sommelier in Paris-Île-de-France. -France in 1976, in his first restaurant, Le Trou gascon.
Finally, the world of sommellerie is taking shape. The first edition of the competition for the best restaurateur-sommelier in France (ancestor of the competition for the best sommelier in France) took place in 1962 and it was not until the end of the decade that the competition for the best sommelier in the world was created. . French professionals will long be the stars. Winner of the title in 1989, Serge Dubs became head sommelier at L’Auberge de l’Ill, in Alsace, with the Haeberlin family; three years later it was the turn of Philippe Faure-Brac, who opened his own restaurant in Paris, while Olivier Poussier, who won the title in 2000, was head sommelier at Lenôtre. For the 2023 edition, it is a sommelier, Pascaline Lepeltier, who defends the tricolor flag. She ranks fourth (out of 68 candidates) while Raimonds Tomsons, the candidate from Latvia, becomes the seventeenth best sommelier in the world.
All of them have largely contributed to giving wines a place of choice in the world of gastronomy. They codified the art of showcasing concert cooking and wine, authored books on the subject and made their science accessible to all amateurs.