The Canadian sommerlier François Chartier (he has an extensive website featuring several blogs, including a section named Sommellerie moléculaire) is out with a new book on food and wine pairing. It’s not just another (superfluous) book on the subject. As the title Papilles et molécules (= Tastebuds and Molecules, unfortunately not available in English) suggests there is some science involved. It turns out in fact that he has applied the principles of flavor pairing to food and wine. With help from Richard Béliveau from Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Martin Loignon from PerkinElmer he has analyzed wines and food and comes up with the following suggestions for lamb, as described in the article “Chemistry-set wine pairing”:

Having roast lamb? Don’t waste it on an ill-advised red Bordeaux, the old standby trotted out by generations of sommeliers. Lamb’s characteristic flavour comes from thymol, an aromatic compound found in the oil of, yes, thyme. It’s also a flavour note associated with red wines from the southern Languedoc region of France, such as Minervois, Corbières or St. Chinian.

Other combinations mentioned in the article include:

rosemary – white wines from northern Alsace
pork – oaked red wines
curries – viognier
cinnamon – pinot noir, grenache, ice cider, oloroso sherry

François Chartier also introduces “bridge ingredients”. Mint, which goes well with sauvignon blanc, shares aroma compounds with parsley, fennel and tarragon. Based on this he theorizes that sauvignon blanc should also pair well with dishes based on these ingredients.

As far as I can see (with my very limited high school French) there are no links or references to all the other activities in the field: Heston Blumenthal’s pioneering of the concept together with François Benzi from Firmenich, the Food pairing website – not even to the TGRWT food blogging event Nevertheless it’s nice to see that the concept has now been applied to food and wine as well. As I don’t own the book yet I can’t tell whether François Chartier includes odor activity values in his discussion or not (but I certainly hope he does!).

Update: The book is now available in English as Taste Buds and Molecules: The Art and Science of Food With Wine.

The first part of the book includes a lot of basic chemistry (which can be skipped if you’re familiar with chemistry) plus descriptions of many perfumes and perfume ingredients which made we wish the book came with it’s own smelling strips. But then comes the interesting part. I have always thought of smell to be a result of molecular recognition – a typical interaction between a drug and a receptor or and enzyme and a substrate. The reason I guess is that this seems very intuitive – just like a shape sorter toy for children! I had also read a review article on “Structure-Odor Relationships” (Rossiter, K. J. Chem. Rev. 1996, 3201). Now the interesting thing is that this might be wrong (or at least not the whole truth – and scientific controversy is always exciting)!

Luca Turin suggests that it is the molecular vibrations of a molecule that we recognize as it’s smell. In an easy accesible article on this (at least for chemists), Turin puts up pro’s and con’s for both theories, including the following:

A very recent review entitled “The Nose as a Stereochemist. Enantiomers and Odor” (Bentley, R. Chem. Rev. 2006, 4099.) mentions Turins work, but with a short dismisal:

… a theory by L. Turin proposes inelastic electron tunneling to account for the biological transduction of molecular vibrations.[35][36] Recent experiments to test predictions of the theory found no evidence to support it [37]…

Reference 35 and 36 can be downloaded from www.flexitral.com – the latter needs to be saved/renamed as a pdf before opening. The contents of 37 is described here. It’s surprising however that Bentley uses ref 37 to disprove the vibration theory, because the authors refer to their own work as “… a paper of solely negative results”. What they did was to perform experiments, partly outlined in Turin’s book, that suggest that molecular vibrations alone cannot explain all aspects of smell. Despite the controversy, Luca Turin and his company Flexitral have been quite succesful in designing new odorants, especially stable odorants which imitate other, less stable molecules. The development of these new odorants is based on designing stable molecules with vibrations similar of the molecule it’s supposed to imitate.

But the story doesn’t end here: Very recently, physicists at University College London reported that they have discovered a physical mechanism that would allow a receptor to distinguish different molecular vibrations (read press release, preprint and SciAm news report). Put simple, the researchers have shown that when a molecule with the correct vibration binds to a receptor, a switch closes allowing electrons to flow. This means that there is experimental theoretical evidence that supports the vibration theory!

Now what does all this have to do with molecular gastronomy and food? When we talk about taste, it’s actually 80% aroma and 20% taste (more on this page). And with aroma, we’re talking about the smell of volatile molecules. Luca Turin touches upon this on the very last pages of the book were he writes that “An area which, in my opinion, is ripe for revolution is that of flavours”. Perhaps it will be possible one day to “synthesize” any desired odor (or aroma!) with a set of molecules (or condiments) with different molecular vibrations?