Deconstructing Dom into its component parts

Grape tannin soaks up the fat of the food, which is why Pinot Noir marries brilliantly with salmon sashimi.

The raw fish suppurates omega-3 oil. If you were to try to put a buttery rich Chardonnay into your mouth at the same time, your gallbladder would soon need urgent medical attention.

By the same token, a lime-rich dressing may give gravadlax freshness and zing, but the citrus component will turn whatever wine you’ve put into your mouth into an acid bath.

It’s best to reduce the citrus in the dressing and rely on the lime-grapefruit character of an unwooded Chardonnay to freshen the mouthfeel of the cured fish.

Like all matters to do with taste, there are very few absolutes: the fact that I don’t like to solve the problems of tricky combinations by resorting to sweetness (sugar is the great culinary leveller) doesn’t mean that the solution doesn’t work.

Any cook will tell you if his sauce isn’t really holding together, the Mary Poppins advice often carries the day.

Properly managed, the sugar isn’t even evident – it’s served as a magical fusing agent, weaving harmonies that were never really there in the first place.

Dom Perignon – the ultimate icon of luxury in the fine-wine market – has been engaged in a food and wine matching exercise with an unusual and peculiarly interesting focus.

Instead of simply seeking the best (or least likely) combinations, the oenological team and the chefs of Château Saran have proceeded to “parse” the wine into its component parts.

Having stripped it down to its various flavour profiles (which will change, evolve or simply vanish over the elapse of time) they have found dishes that serve to highlight each of these features.

The Seven Sensualities Tasting is necessarily a flashy exercise. You cannot spend an entire evening quaffing the 2000 vintage of Dom Perignon and convince yourself that this is a Spartan existence.

You are not surprised to hear that in between producing the world’s largest volume luxury wine brand, the winemaking team travelled the globe seeking the perfect elements for this undertaking.

The dinner begins quite slowly: some moderately smoky, not overly grippy, Ba Da Chun tea serves as a palate cleanser.

This is immediately followed by finely sliced daikon (radish) with a tiny flake of endive which you are free to dip in a tannin-free but not overly peppery blond Hyblon oil from Sicily.

All this appears to be a great song-and-dance over very little.

The picture doesn’t change when the rambutan dressed with apple syrup served with deep-fried shallot arrives.

We’re still on the first sensuality, we’re being asked to deconstruct the Dom Perignon and so become aware of its subtle, but ever-present acidity.

By the time we reach the second sensuality, scallop sashimi with vanilla and Hawaiian blue salt (or with yuzu and bamboo salt), we become aware of its palate density, but also its creaminess and its elusive brininess.

Some of the courses – lightly cooked kingklip with peach and truffle – are delicious, earthy, aromatic, but they don’t bring out any of the individual elements in the wine.

The highlight for me was a Moroccan couscous dish, in which pigeon was replaced with quail, made with the 27 spices of Ras el Hanout, the royal mixture of Arabic cuisine.

Here, we moved away from the single threads which make up the tartan of flavours of the food, fizz (and fez), and reached the richly patterned picture of complexity that lifted both the wine and the meal.

I would have been happy to stay with this harmony, but this was never going to be “the end ”.

As it happens, I had no objection to the fusion dessert of caviar, barley, argan oil which used saffron ice cream for its foil.

It was the next episode, the tea and coconut-ash pudding – meant to show where the wine would evolve to over time – that failed. I believe it was the obsession of staying with only one vintage of Dom Perignon which cost this last course the high note of the occasion. How were we to see how this dish – intended to show the prospective evolution of the wine – might succeed if an older vintage of the same Champagne wasn’t available to prove the point?

The heart of this exercise was vinous (rather than culinary) deconstructionism, making c hef de cave Richard Geoffroy something of a Ferr€n Adri€ of the Champagne world.

It never lacked for entertainment value and was, unsurprisingly, immensely enjoyable.

It also provided refreshing proof that when the greatest high-end brand in the wine world (Dom Perignon reputedly sells between 350 000 and 500 000 cases annually) makes this kind of effort, its proprietors take nothing for granted – South African icons please note.