Wines To Wake Up Your Spoiled Taste Buds
Why "rule rebellion" is the driving principle in food and drink right now.
“How Did Our Taste Buds Get So Spoiled?” asked an article in last weekend’s New York Times Style section. As the writer, Marie Solis, stands in a long line at a trendy bakery for matcha-mango morning buns, shakshuka focaccia, and French onion soup croissants, she muses on how and why Americans’ palates now crave once-unfamiliar ingredients. More specifically, she’s curious about how so-called “flavormaxxing” has become the norm with food and drink.
How had our tastes become so discerning? When did, say, a blueberry muffin start to seem a bit meager, less sophisticated, as compared with the multi-hyphenate baked goods that we all appeared to be craving?
Somewhere along the way, I had unwittingly spoiled my taste buds. I was not a foodie, no. That identity category barely exists anymore. These days it is a norm, at least among those with disposable income, to have an ultrarefined palate and to embark on new culinary experiences whenever possible. It was not a hobby or notable personality trait; it was almost like breathing.
I just happened to be another person alive in our overdetermined era of hyperflavor, in which many of us seek out increasingly elaborate combinations of ingredients and spices to satisfy — what exactly? A drive toward indulgence? An anxious need to project a certain worldliness to our peers? Maybe, like a hojicha maple miso cookie, it’s many things at once.
We might worry it was a sign of an empire in decline if we were not so busy savoring all of this complexity.
We all know what Solis is talking about, as our menus and recipes become more and more filled with matcha-dusted, pistachio-encrusted, tamarind-scented, yuzu-spiked, gochujang-glazed, tahini-drizzled, grilled-lemon-garnished, miso-infused mashups. Actually, it was rather amusing to see the New York Times tackle this topic, since it’s had no small hand in ushering our “era of hyperflavor” into being. It’s not for nothing that a meme lampooning the ur-Times recipe as “Lemony garlicky gochujang brown butter gnocchi” went viral.
A few years ago, I worked as a writer on the “trend team” for the largest-circulation food magazine in the world. Mostly, that meant watching a lot of TikTok food videos and translating viral recipe trends into words. I wrote posts about crispy sushi rice waffles, dirty martini pasta, miso pasta, French onion soup pasta, lasagna soup, smash burger tacos, caviar and sour cream on a Dorito, something called cowboy butter, and a “San Francisco-style” Vietnamese pasta mashup that involved fish sauce, oyster sauce, soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, and 20 cloves of garlic (which was the Times’ most popular recipe of 2022). My favorite dish of that era is likely kimchi grilled cheese, about which I wrote: “I can divide my life into two eras. The time before I knew about kimchi grilled cheese, and the time after I learned about kimchi grilled cheese.”
Solis suggests that recipes like these—and the liberal use of the ingredients she details in the Times—reflect our spoiled bougie palates. But near the end of her article, she brushes closer to the truth. Flavormaxxing and recipe mashups says more about Americans embracing the principle of “rule rebellion.” According to Beck Flavors, the flavor consulting and development company that Solis interviews, rule rebellion is a top food and beverage trend this year.
People are tired of rules, dogma, and the tyranny of “authenticity” when it comes to food and drink. In their desire for new flavors and combinations, they’re rebelling against tradition.
Something similar is happening in wine. Just look at any trendy wine list and what you’ll see is a pushback to classic wine categories and to the way wine is traditionally presented. There are chilled reds, tannic skin-contact whites, orange wines that are pink, rosé-like bubbly reds, co-fermentations of white and red grapes, blends of grapes from completely different wine cultures (palomino and syrah; blaufränkisch and pinot noir; friulano and grüner veltliner). I think this is a great thing. It’s good for wine to be pushed out of its stuffy, gatekept traditional confines.
For this week’s tasting report, I’ve rounded up a handful of delicious, exciting wines that break the rules in these various ways.
Seven Genre-Defying, Rule-Rebelling Wines
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