Pairing with sherry: Craft LA competes in Copa Jerez

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The Sherry Council of America, a Washington D.C.-based advocate group for the Spanish wine, recently held a sherry and food pairing competition at the Astor Center in New York. Five teams of finalists, including Matt Accarrino, chef at Craft in Los Angeles, and sommelier David Lusby, competed with specially prepared dishes and sherries to match.

Even by the standards of most wine geeks, sherry geeks are extreme. The wines, made by a special aging method in the torrid vineyards of Jerez in Andalusia, Spain, are virtually ignored by the general public, usually written off as sweet or silly, equated with those breathy television ads for Harvey’s Bristol Cream in the ‘70s. Nothing is further from the truth, but convincing people of this in a restaurant setting is no small feat....

Sommelier Lusby was smitten by sherry early in his career. “They’re just so dramatically diverse,” he says. “No wine in the world covers the gamut of flavors that sherry does. They can be super, super clean and bone dry, like fino and manzanilla sherries, perfect with seafood and small bites, or just almonds –- to the beautiful sweet cream sherries, which, like every true great dessert wine, has evident sweetness, but isn’t cloying –- it doesn’t stick to the sides of your mouth.”

Accarino and Lusby paired three courses. Course one was a sherry-braised octopus with chickpea croutons, paired with Bodega La Gitana Manzanilla sherry –- one of this country’s most popular. Course two was braised oxtail served with brioche bread pudding and a cube of Wagyu beef, paired with a rare Palo Cortado from Emilio Lustau, a wine that has the firm acidity of an amontillado and the depth of an oloroso. The third course, dessert, paired a pear tarte tatin with the diabolically rich cream sherry from Bodegas Dios Baco –- (that’s ‘the God Bacchus’ to the uninitiated).

In the end, the top prize went to chef Seamus Mullen of Suba Restaurant in New York and his sommelier, Roger Kugler, who has more than 30 sherries on his wine list. Mullen and Kugler will go on to represent the U.S. in a worldwide competition held in Jerez next month.

-- Patrick Comiskey