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Wine List Cheat Sheet at Scullers Jazz Club Green Room, Cambridge

Posted 08/14/2008 at 09:10 AM by Cathy

Not many wine lists include a cheat sheet.

So when you find one – as at the Scullers Jazz Club Green Room – you take note.

They call it a "Wine and Food Pairing Guide" and it is a handy reference to the most popular red and white varietals and four or five foods that pair with them.
?We're talking broad strokes here, as in:

• Riesling: candied walnuts, duck, spicy chutney, caramel

• Shiraz: Bleu [sic] cheese, salmon, beets, sharp cheddar

• Pinot Noir: tenderloin, brie, chicken, mushrooms, tuna

• Merlot: Grilled meats, swordfish, berries, dark chocolate

• Zinfandel: Cajun, blackened fish, duck, beef, pork, Brie

(That Zinfandel sure does get around.)

The pairing guide, and the wine list itself, draw effectively on the power of suggestion.

The description for the 2007 Charles Krug Sauvignon Blanc, for example, was "Guava, Grapefruit, Melon, with a Delicate Finish." My dining partner read that, sniffed the wine, then exclaimed excitedly, "Guava! That's guava! I finally get it..."

Effective, indeed.

That excitement, unfortunately, lasted only as long as the inhale.

The best thing about this wine was its nose. After that, things deteriorated quickly.

Describing a wine as "limpid" could be a good thing if you're talking about a phase of the taste, the mid-palate, say, after the initial impact but before the sip's finish. "Limpid" could be a good thing when it's used as a pause, when it simply gives your palate a little bit of a breather between two otherwise very interesting events. But when "limpid" is the best you could do to describe the entire duration of the taste, you may as well have said "flat" or, let's be honest, "this wine does nothing for me."

I would like to be able to say that about this wine, because at least "this wine does nothing for me" still keeps it on fairly neutral ground. But the finish of this wine for me prohibits any such neutrality. The finish – a sip's final punctuation mark – was metallic, tinny, and bitter. It was a colon-open parentheses finish rather than a colon-closed parentheses finish or even a simple period finish.

Which, for a California Sauvignon Blanc that starts out so well, is really too bad.

Colon Closed-Parentheses.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe
Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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