We are talking to Maciej Nowicki, a journalist, and expert, about food and wine pairing, the most popular myths about this drink, and the future of the Polish wine industry.

Tomasz: How was your long weekend? Was it full of wine experiences?

Maciej: A bit, but I also managed to catch my breath a bit. It has been a very intensive year as far as the wine season is concerned, and I must admit that I am happy if I have a moment of "rest" from wine. I think I, at least minimally, managed to recharge my batteries for another week.

Tomasz: I understand that winemakers are making up for the year lost due to the pandemic?

Maciej: Yes, definitely. Everything that could not be done last year has been transferred to this year. However, I do not have the impression that winemaking in Poland suffered much, as many online meetings have been organized. You could even say that the pandemic necessitated new ways of communicating and, as a result, the opportunities to meet winemakers expanded. Despite their physical absence, they could talk about themselves and their wines. So it served the purpose, and I think this hybrid mode of communication will stay with us: we will meet either on-site or in front of screens.

Tomasz: Were online wine tastings organized?

Maciej: Yes, of course. If it wasn't for the pandemic, no one would probably have come up with such an idea. And now it appears that all you have to do is pour the wine into smaller vessels and send it by courier. Samples usually have a shelf life of about 48 hours, and courier services have developed to the point where you can pick up your package the very next day after shipping. The tasting itself looks like this. The presenter and participants sit at home, pour wine into glasses, try it and discuss it via instant messaging. These online tastings are now a good option for customers living in smaller towns where on-site tastings are rarely organized.

Tomasz: I hear from yet another person that we could have in some way benefitted from the pandemic.

Maciej: That's true. However, chefs and restaurateurs were in a worse situation than representatives of the wine world. It probably depended on the restaurant formula. The more affordable it was in the pre-lockdown days, the easier it was to organize a takeaway version, and the more it drifted towards fine dining, the worse it got. I'm not sad about it, because for me fine dining, especially in its Polish version, was often so terribly exaggerated that a significant reduction in its presence on the market is not a matter that brought a single tear to my eye.

Tomasz: From the point of view of pairing wine with food, what are the main differences between the fine dining formula and the more accessible, casual one?

Maciej: I think that in fine dining, these pairings can be more interesting on the one hand and more demanding on the other because its essence is the use of many ingredients and flavours that intermingle in a small tasting portion. Usually, one selects the wine for the most prominent element of the dish, and with such a complex, surprising composition, this can be a challenge. That's why top restaurants have always looked for the best sommeliers that could manage this, find the right key. In casual cuisine, it is simpler to grasp the overall profile of the dish and rely on a single point, which makes it easier to select a wine. However, this cannot be generalized in any way. After all, it all depends on the type of cuisine and the ingredients.

Tomasz: Which cuisine is the most difficult to pair wines with? I find Korean cuisine problematic because of sweet, salty, and spicy flavours which are dominant.

Maciej: From my point of view, oriental cuisine can be quite easy to pair with wine. Regardless of how the flavours are distributed, whether there is more sweetness, spiciness, or umami in the dish, wines with more residual sugar tend to work well for sipping. The sweeter wines that some people despise go nicely with this type of cuisine, especially their more aromatic versions like gewürztraminer, traminer, Muscat. It is a rewarding direction for those wines that will not always find their way into pairings with European cuisines, such as Italian.

Sushi can be a problem. There are not many options in this area because sushi in Poland is usually based on rolls, and their range is quite limited. It seems to me that the simplest thing would probably be to match sparkling wine with sushi. However, there are different opinions on this subject. For about a decade now, at least once a year, tastings on how to match wine with sushi have been organized (laughs). As in the case of many things in Poland, there is also a total misconception regarding Choya wine, which many people consider compatible with Japanese cuisine. It is preposterous because I reckon the only use for this product, which has little in common with plum wine, is as a digestif.

Tomasz: How would you explain the compatibility of wine with food? What does it mean that wine goes well with food?

Maciej: I don't like to put it in very formal terms: it's simply a matter of not feeling that something gets in the way, that something falls short. When tasting the food and sipping the wine, we should have the feeling that everything comes together. It is simpler to say what can go wrong: if we have a particular dish, then we try the wine and we do not feel the wine at all, it means that it was a bad combination because the wine was dominated by food. The opposite also happens when the wine is too intense. Then there are issues of sweetness, saltiness, dryness, and aromatic compatibility - ideally we should feel that everything is in harmony and fits together.

Tomasz: While we're on the subject of pairing wine with food, let me ask you about wine for cooking. Do you have your own specific types? I have always used a simple key. I add uncomplicated, not too tannic, dry wines with high acidity to food.

Maciej: Basically, yes, I agree. The idea is that the wine should remain neutral and enhance the flavour of the dish, not dominate it. Sometimes you use the same wine that you will later use to wash down the food. The worst solution is to add wine that you wouldn't like to drink. Well, if we want the dish to be tasty, why use the wrong wine to prepare it? Of course, it will become a little less unpalatable during the heat treatment, but that's not the point. It is one of the persistent myths. If some wine is bad that, it is only suitable for cooking.

Tomasz: What are some other wine myths?

Maciej: Some myths are ridiculous. Although they arouse disbelief, they do not hinder the enjoyment of wine. There are also harmful myths and they need to be fought with. In Poland, many of those myths have functioned in the same form for many years. I note with horror that even fairly respectable national magazines publish texts about wine that repeat rumours they have heard. One of the most popular is the issue of the indentation in the bottle: according to this belief, the deeper the indentation in the bottle, the better the wine, which is absurd. The same goes for the bottle wall thickness which is supposed to indicate the high quality of the wine - this is used by many wineries in a purely marketing way. There is also a common myth about screw caps or corks: in Poland, we associate screw caps with a bad taste, and, consequently, wines closed in this way are categorised as inferior. The truth is that the screw cap is one of the best closures for wine. I suspect that with time more and more wines will be closed in this way.

I am also constantly puzzled by the fact that in Poland it is a standard practice to keep the wine in the kitchen. It is the warmest and most ectothermic room in the house, and nothing harms wine more than fluctuating temperatures - which are even worse than high temperatures.

Tomasz: You are the co-author of a guide to Polish wines. What kinds of wines are produced in Poland? Which styles do Polish winemakers produce best?

Maciej: This is a very interesting topic, because Poland, just like many other countries in Central Europe, is a kind of beneficiary of climate warming. However, warm September and October, which are often called „Polish golden autumn”, are still not the rule, and this, unfortunately, affects the maturity of red wines. White wines (including sparkling wines) are now dominant , red varieties are becoming more and more prominent, which is proven by increasingly growing numbers of pinot noir plantings. Polish winemakers are also more and more willing to age their wines in oak barrels, showing more and more patience - for many years red wines were also a problem, going on sale too early.

“I bet that in the future there won't be a style of wine that can't be produced here. But it's more a question of keeping our own character and not trying to imitate what's happening in the west, in countries with strong wine traditions like Spain, France, and Italy.”

It is said that Poland, the Czech Republic, and even the Scandinavian countries will offer what countries located further south will soon not be able to produce due to climate changes. These are lighter, smoother, more refreshing, fruity wines, with slightly higher acidity. This will be something that can attract attention because these are wines that are now sought after all over the world. I think this is our direction.

Polish winemakers are just gaining experience although they often try to be overly polite to the mass consumer who still prefers sweeter wines. Many producers make such wines and think that it is a good solution - after all, they sell well. This is because of what happened in the 1990s and even before. We had Sophia, Egri Bikaver, sweet and disgusting, but everyone drank it. Then the Polish market opened up. We were quickly targeted by European countries as a potential market for not very successful, poor-quality dry wines. So we got a lot of mediocre Bordeaux, dry and ultra-acidic. A lot of people went for it because it was the right thing to do. After all, we had become a capitalist country and everyone wanted to enjoy French dry wines.

“Therefore, many people, especially older ones, think that if the label says that the wine is dry, it is going to be sour. This is obviously untrue, but these memories are firmly rooted. Younger generations, on the other hand, talk more of dry wines. I believe that it is precisely this direction that is the future of Poland and it will dominate.”

Tomasz: How have your preferences regarding the taste of wine evolved? Are there any wines that you used to love and now you hate?

Maciej: Yes, and I am quite a statistical, common example in this respect. At the very beginning, I had a strong preference for red wines, which matured for a long time in the barrel. Those were usually Spanish wines, such as Rioja, or Italian wines, such as Brunello. This style of heavily ripe fruit, lined with notes of barrel, was my style. Later my taste evolved. Anyway, it is proven that taste buds change with us, and in a way, they can be 'brought up. Now I drink completely different wines, in fact, I only go for lighter, fruity wines without cask maturation, refreshing, often with quite a high acidity. I laugh that I have no idea what I will do with the wines from years ago that are waiting for better times in my archive - they represent my tastes from 10 or 15 years ago and I don't know if I want to reach for them now. Maybe I'll organise some wider tasting (laughs).

Tomasz: This question troubles many people: is the price of wine closely related to its quality?

Maciej: There is no simple answer to this question. The price is a combination of the contents of the bottle, the history of the producer, the region, the variety, and many other factors. Cheap, market wines are rather the products of huge, industrial winemaking combinations, often "improved" in various ways to make their aromas as close as possible to the needs of the consumers who buy them. The more individual the character, the more individual the final price is. A „hot” topic in our country is the prices of Polish wine which are considered to be too high. Indeed, it is difficult to find a bottle of wine under 45 zlotys, but we have to remember that 99% of Polish wineries constantly invest in land, planting, processing equipment, while in countries with a long history of winemaking, these expenses were amortised a long time ago by most producers. It is also worth bearing in mind the various fiscal burdens, which are so high that, for a change, we are among the European leaders. However, I have no doubt that over the years wine prices will naturally fall.

"It makes little or no impression on me that a wine is expensive. It does not matter that a wine from a very well-known producer or a recognized appellation, "automatically" has to be exceptional."

Sometimes good wines come along, and sometimes a wine evokes so little emotion that it does not affect my bank balance. I think it is better to try more of the slightly cheaper wines (and therefore representing a lower lineage, appellation level) from different varietals or styles and in this way and on the basis of your own experience, form an opinion (and preferences), instead of focusing solely on the more expensive options. The fact that expensive wine must be better is another myth.

Tomasz: What about natural wines?

Maciej: In Poland, natural wines are gaining in importance year by year as well. I am a huge fan of this direction, which I define as minimal intervention. It is the closest to nature - the winemaker's job is not to interfere with the wine's natural fermentation and independent maturation. Neither chemicals are added to stabilise wine, nor dozens of sprays are used to make bunches of grapes grow and swell like balloons. This, however, entails certain risks: if something goes wrong, the winemaker may claim that it was meant to be like that because it is a natural wine. Such situations still happen, but the percentage is getting smaller and smaller every year.

Tomasz: There are often strange aromatic notes in natural wines that are difficult to find in conventionally produced wines...

Maciej: It's a matter of which wines you come across. Some hardcore producers offer vinegar, pickled and vegetable aromas combined with super-high acidity. This may be disqualifying for a customer who has never experienced such flavours before. However, there are winemakers whose wines do not give us the feeling that they are made naturally at all. There is now an increasing emphasis on the fact that natural wine does not necessarily mean a wine that is unacceptable to many people in terms of flavours and aromas. Winemakers, who used to go 'all the way', as they say colloquially, are now trying to make their wines more approachable in style.

"Admittedly, I like this wine radicalism and these crazy aromas, which are even laughed at in my editorial office, considering that some of the wines I admire should not exist at all. (Laughs)."

Thank you for the interview.

Text: Tomasz Zielke
Photos: Jakub Wilczek