User:RCaparoso

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CAPAROSO, RANDAL (1956- ), wine professional, restaurateur, wine judge and wine writer known particularly for his authoritative knowledge of Asian/fusion food and wine, as well as for his practical explications of more difficult to grasp sensory concepts such as umami (see articles to follow). Caparoso's career in the wine profession began in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was born and raised, and where he began work as a sommelier in a French style restaurant in 1978. Living and working in the multi-cultural, melting pot environment of Hawaii, Caparoso soon became known for his global approach to wine selection, putting less emphasis on popular wines such as California Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon, and French Bordeaux and Burgundy. Instead, Caparoso's wine lists highlighted vin de pays ("country" wines) of Southern France, wines made from little known native grapes of Southern Italy, Spain and Portugal, as well as alternative wine types from newly emerging "cold climate" growing regions of the New World such as Santa Barbara, Oregon's Willamette Valley, and the Margaret River of Australia. Caparoso believed this increased diversity better matched the globally mixed ingredients and techniques long associated with Hawaiian food; particularly that of the chefs associated with the formally recognized Hawaii Regional Cuisine movement, which began in the late 1980s.

Caparoso's culinary approach to restaurant wine merchandising attracted national attention after he met Roy Yamaguchi in 1988, with whom he partnered to help found the first Roy's Restaurant in Honolulu at that time. A James Beard Award winning chef, Yamaguchi has been considered a founding father of East-West or fusion style of cuisine (Yamaguchi originally defined it as Euro-Asian, although later it became "Hawaiian Fusion"). The original Roy's Restaurant concept was successful enough to be transplanted in locations in over twenty five other cities, from Tokyo to New York, within twelve years; and Caparoso's globally sourced wine lists resulted in Santé magazine naming him the country's first "Restaurant Wine & Spirits Professional of the Year" in 1998. In 1993, Ronn Wiegand MW, MS named Caparoso "Wine Professional of the Year" in his Restaurant Wine magazine.

Some Useful Guidelines to Matching Asian/Fusion Foods

As a biweekly wine columnist for The Honolulu Advertiser since 1981, and in recent years in online columns (www.wineloverspage.com/randysworld and www.novusvinum), Caparoso has summarized his findings on matching wines with foods not indigenous to European wine cultures:

• Asian/fusion foods tend to utilize the entire palate of taste and tactile sensations (unlike Western foods).

• Harmony and balance of multiple sensations is essential to the quality of Asian/fusion food preparation, and so is also essential in the wines served in this context.

• Smoothly balanced, fruit forward wines have the highest percentage chance of matching foods with elevated hot-sour-salty-sweet-bitter-umami sensations.

• Soft or lower alcohol/tannin/oak wines tend to "feel" smoother.

• Sweetness in both food preparation and wines can offer a balancing contrast to saltiness, as well as "hot" spice, sour, or high fat components in foods.

• Fruity wines can suggest sweetness (through "sweet" aromas and flavors) without actual residual sugar content.

• "Fruit driven" wines (whether dry, sweet, full, light, white or red) match dishes with sweet components.

• Spicy aroma/flavor components in wines like similar "spice" components in foods (i.e. use of chiles, varieties of peppercorn, chili powders and pastes).

• Higher acid ("crisp") wines like similar matches in dishes (i.e. vinegars, citrus fruits, sour greens, etc.).

• Lower acid ("soft") wines like similar taste sensations (i.e. butter, oils, and cream) in dishes.

• Barrel fermented whites (i.e. typical Chardonnays) tend to have creamy or buttery textures.

• Strongly oaked ("smoky") wines, whether white or red, have their place with smoky (i.e. wood or charcoal grilled, roasted, smoked, or charred) foods.

• High tannin ("big" or "hard") reds prefer high fat/protein foods, or some use of peppers, radishes or mustards.

• Low tannin ("soft" or "round") reds prefer lower food fats and proteins (especially "white" meats).

• Soft, elegant, complex and/or well matured wines are ideal with high umami foods (i.e. use of mushrooms, truffle, seaweeds, aged cheeses, vine ripe tomatoes, braises, natural stock reductions, etc.).

• Re one of the most basic principles of all food & mine matching: unbalanced wines and foods (i.e. bad cooking and lousy wines) are unlikely to go with anything!

Deconstructing Umami

For Caparoso, the taste of umami is less obvious than the more familiar sensations of sweetness, saltiness, sourness, and bitterness. Umami is more likely to manifest itself as an overall reaction on the palate to certain foods and beverages rich in amino acids, whether attained through cooking processes or activated by high amino acid ingredients. It is not, however, a textural quality (hard, soft, smooth, crunchy, etc.), but rather a "savory," "delicious" or somewhat "meaty" sensation.

According to the Japanese food scientist who made the first formal identification of umami in the 19th century, umami is one of the two senses (along with sweetness) that the palate perceives as pleasant. Sensations of salt, sour and bitter, on the other hand, are not pleasant in themselves, except in the context of other sensations.

A common demonstration of this pleasing taste is a pinch of MSG (monosodium glutamate) - essentially a sodium salt of glutamic acid originally manufactured from seaweeds to stimulate umami sensations -- mixed into lukewarm water. What the palate feels is a stimulation of saliva, alerting the taste buds and tactile senses, giving a mouth-watering effect while boosting aroma-related sensations of flavor. Making bland food taste "delicious," no wonder MSG is a key ingredient in many of our packaged foods!

Lest there be any further misunderstanding, Caparoso explains that umami is not simply a component in foods. It is, in fact, a phenomenon rising from actual taste buds on the tongue that are more likely to be stimulated by components such as monosodium glutamate. Sugar tastes sweet, salt tastes salty, and high amino acid ingredients taste, well, like umami. In recent years two American scientists named Charles Zuker and Charles Ryber have identified these specific taste bud cells as "T1R1" and "T1R3" (without, however, pinpointing any specific area of the tongue where they are located) which working in tandem create palate receptors sensitive to foods high in amino acids.

The perception of amino acid compounds occurs in many combinations of foods and wines (wines containing small amounts -- roughly 20 grams per liter -- of amino acids) that give us distinct pleasure. One of the leading exponents of umami today is a Master of Wine Tim Hanni. According to Hanni, only the phenomenon of umami explains the "deliciousness created by fermenting, curing and preserving" of certain foods. Two basic examples: well matured cheeses like Italian Parmigiano or Pecorino, and cured meats like smoked bacon, lardons or Pancetta - all commonly used by cooks, or at the table everyday by consumers, to enhance our enjoyment of dishes.

In his own restaurant experiences, Caparoso has found that umami sensations are elevated by cooking processes resulting in complex, slowly evolved stocks derived from chicken, veal bones and shellfish, as well as the reductive aspects of slow cooking, pot a feu, nages, and natural essences. Wily chefs achieve more intensity through sauces, broths, and vinaigrettes that are bound with umami intense ingredients such as dried shiitake or porcini mushrooms, truffles, and vine ripened tomatoes; while home cooks accomplish the same thing by use of instant stocks or bouillon cubes (the primary ingredient in most commercial products is, in fact, umami stimulating MSG).

Not surprisingly, it is in Asian cuisines -- in which ingredients and cooking techniques are often very simple or understated, but very strong in the sum total of parts -- that umami naturally plays a significant role. Seaweeds, dried fish and fish stocks are high in umami, as are seasonings such as Japanese shichimi and Chinese five spice. Umami plays a restorative role when dashi (a broth made with bonita flakes and dried kelp) is added to Japanese dishes, and conducts the electrical, hot/sweet reaction of sambal (chile paste) when added to Southeast Asian dishes.

The significance of umami when it comes to wine is multifold. It goes a long way towards explaining why certain wines -- especially the more complex and mature wines in which amino acids are more in balance with other taste components -- seem to naturally relate to more foods. A refined, silken, crisp yet soft, fruity yet multi-spice scented Pinot Noir, for instance, seems to do a lot more for a wood grilled salmon than a soft, fruity, but simple, one-dimensional Beaujolais made from the Gamay grape.

The wider range of contrasting sensations of wines made from Pinot Noir tends to stimulate a more umami-like effect on the palate. This is why Pinot Noir, as opposed to red wines made from other grapes, is often amazingly friendly with oysters, clams, mussels, squid, salt cod and other unlikely varieties of fish, especially in bourrides, cioppino, and other seafood broths. It is probably the umami factor that is behind the feeling of "epiphany" often experienced by wine lovers when they first realize that Pinot Noir goes better with certain fish - like tuna and salmon -- than most white wines.

When it comes to food preparations, the significance of umami determines many of our wine selections. A young, thick, fruity California Cabernet Sauvignon, for instance, is predictably good with a simple cut of grilled, charred beef. But if you braise beef with a myriad of seasonings and vegetables and serve it in a complex natural reduction, you are creating a high umami flavor "bridge" that is less welcoming for young, tough, belligerently tannic California Cabernets. However, softer, well matured Cabernet Sauvignons (given over ten years of aging in the bottle), as well as less fruity but more gently balanced styles of Cabernet Sauvignon from France's Bordeaux region, have all been found to better round out the taste of braised beef and pot roasts, and vice-versa. The phenomenon of umami, in other words, is more likely to occur in better balanced wines; especially older ones.

To what extent is umami a state of mind rather than an actual taste sensation? Caparoso allow that there are many aspects of wine and food -- for instance, the idea that the taste of wine improves by "breathing" through exposure to air -- that are probably mythical, and that the line between umami and simpler qualities of balance and intensity is probably just as blurred. Sensations, after all, are basically sensory messages related by the palate and olfactory to the brain -- a process that ultimately defies definitive analysis. The important thing is enjoying what you know; and if you can understand the concept of utilizing certain ingredients and cooking techniques to accentuate the taste of food, and selecting certain wines over others to achieve further favorable sensations, then you are grasping the concept of umami whether you understand it or not.