Winery chefs often trade in celebrity status and the larger salaries they would earn working in prominent hotels and restaurants for the luxury of cooking for an invited, knowledgeable and appreciative audience. But for chefs wanting a less hectic lifestyle, fairly normal working hours and most weekends off, it's a good trade-off. Plus, they learn about wine. Jerry Comfort, former Executive Chef at Beringer Vineyards and now Senior Wine Education Manager who creates and executes wine and food education programs for Foster's Wine Estates Americas, explains, "When I joined Beringer Vineyards in St. Helena as executive chef in 1991, I thought I knew something about wine and food pairing. But the day I came to work at Beringer was the day I began my education in food and wine. Wine and food pairing is not really a question of what 'goes' with what food, like the old rule of red wine with beef, white wine with fish. In our work here at the winery, we've seen over and over again that the key question is whether the wine reacts-changes in flavor-when tasted with certain flavors in the foods we're eating a lot of today, like the acidity in a lemon or tomato sauce, the spiciness of the chilies or peanut sauce in Thai dishes, or the salty anchovies in a Caesar salad. What we have found is that we can predict and compensate for these reactions and balance the basic tastes in food in a way that ensures that a wine will taste great with any cuisine."
Jerry Comfort is the author of the definitive guide to cheese and wine pairing, The Progressive Wine and Cheese Pairing Wheel (2003), and more recently the award-winning Web site ewinematch.com. He is a Certified Master Sommelier.
Additionally, Comfort served as an instructor at Beringer's "Master Series" school, and as a guest instructor at famed culinary schools like Culinary
Institute of America in New York and Napa Valley, L'Ecole Hoteliere de Lausanne and the Napa Valley Professional Culinary School. Comfort has conducted food and wine seminars internationally at such events as Viniexpo in Finland, Prowein in Germany, Vinexpo in Tokyo, and the Gourmet Summit in Singapore.