As guests return to the recovering on-premise, they are looking for unique and memorable experiences. But one experience that was prevalent pre-COVID has not come back in the same way—wine and food pairings.
There seems to be a sea change among consumers—and staff—surrounding the value of wine and food pairings. Some have abandoned them in favor of other pairings—like cocktails and food—while others have abandoned the idea of tastings all together.
We spoke with Vonda Freeman, wine director at Indigo Road Hospitality Group, which owns, operates, and manages restaurants and boutique hotels throughout the country, to better understand the state of pairings in today’s on-premise venues.
The Decline of On-Premise Pairings
Freeman says there are a number of factors that have contributed to the decline of food pairings, and these catalysts are coming from both sides of the bar. On the staff side, the labor shortage has made planning and prepping for pairings difficult or impossible due to a lack of staff.
“Chefs, oftentimes, instead of coming in and working on their menu and collaborating with their sommelier, they're doing prep cook responsibilities because the prep cook didn't show up, or they don't have a prep cook,” says Freeman, who notes that many restaurants are lacking positions like bar managers and sommeliers altogether, which means half of a pairing program is nonexistent. “We are definitely in a situation where there are a lot of locations that don't have either.”
And the staff a restaurant does have is not always interested in learning or taking on new responsibilities, like a pairing program. “They would like to come in; clock in as a server, etc.; make their money; and clock out. They don't want to have to do any other responsibilities. That's just the way the mentality is right now,” says Freeman. “They're like, ‘You know, my time is too precious. I want to do other things with it.’ And I think that's something that we're seeing across the board. Whether it’s good or bad, I think that the importance of the quality of life for people has changed since COVID. I definitely think people are liking that slower pace.”
On the guest side, there’s a similar phenomenon happening as people are enjoying familiar comforts versus being adventurous. “People are going into their comfort zone and picking what they know and what they love because they're not going out as often,” says Freeman, who notes that guests are also guarding their time more and opting out of longer dinners like pairings. “I honestly don't see the simplicity of everything changing anytime soon. I think that's where we are for a while—that comfort zone.”
Freeman says this return to the familiar may also be why nostalgia has been trending and things like classic, simple cocktails are back at the top of menus. The labor shortage is also contributing to this trend as simpler cocktails are faster to make. “When you're concocting a cocktail, and you're busy, and you've got four deep at the bar, and you're trying to do about eight bottle touches, it doesn't make any sense, it's too much. You're not able to actually deliver the proper service to your guests,” says Freeman.
The Current State of On-Premise Pairings
This trend in simplicity is also carrying over into pairings—when bars/restaurants do offer them. “When you're talking about pairings, it's just going back to the classic pairings that we've always heard of,” says Freeman, noting that champagne and sparkling wine are big right now. “I think that people are really enjoying sparkling wine right now with the go-tos, obviously, oysters, but they're also loving it with things like fried chicken and French fries.”
Aside from the champagne and sparkling wine trend, when a bar/restaurant does offer a pairing, it’s now most commonly with cocktails versus wines as establishments focus more on what's behind the bar instead of what's inside the cellar.
While Freeman thinks the shift to cocktail pairings is in line with the mixology boom of the last few years, she also believes cocktails offer bar staff an interesting way to express themselves.
“When I taste a wine, I'm tasting the creation that someone else has made, and the time they put into it, and their vision of what that product should be. Whereas in mixology, you have control of that within your four walls—you can create that cocktail,” says Freeman, who says mixology offers more creativity and control. “You get to choose all the components, you get to choose the flavor profile—if you want it to be sweet or sour, if you want it to be high alcohol or not.”
With this freedom of creativity, the cocktails can be adjusted to meet the food, which is not possible with wine. Freeman gave the example of a cocktail pairing they were recently building with a short rib taco. The first iteration of a tequila cocktail didn’t match up with the richness of the dish. It wasn’t until they built a cocktail with a high acidity to cut through the fattiness of the short ribs that they landed on a pairing.
“The basics of food and beverage pairing, the base chemistry, is always going to be the same,” says Freeman. “You don't want to have your beverage compete with your dish; you want to have it complement your dish. Anytime you're looking at pairings, you want to make sure that you know the acidity level can cut through any sort of fattiness. If you've got a big stout, you don't want to pair that with a delicate type item. A lot of it is the basic chemistry of beverage and food pairing.”
Flavors in a pairing are also often dictated by what’s seasonally available as more bars/restaurants move toward sourcing local, fresh ingredients. So when a kitchen gets a batch of fresh fruit, herbs, etc., the bartenders are also eyeing those ingredients for their cocktail program, whether it be for a syrup, shrub, infusion, etc. “I think it's almost natural that what is being sourced locally will end up on a menu, not just the food menu, but the cocktail menu,” says Freeman. “So then those products are naturally going to go hand-in-hand because they're using the same ingredient.”
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