The new professionals of the table: from the water-sommelier to the cupping expert
Coffee with clams, water from Hawaii with sushi: the new pairing crosses terroir, cru, extraction, and ageing. Highly trained specialists are needed.
Would you ever drink coffee with spaghetti alle vongole, risotto Milanese or pizza Margherita? They are unusual pairings, of course, but they could give great satisfaction to the most adventurous tasters. This is assured by Mauro Illiano, with Andrej Godina one of the greatest coffee connoisseurs in Italia and founder of a coffee academy in Naples. Illiano and Godina belong to the ranks of the so-called atypical sommeliers, who over the years have joined the traditional wine professionals. Over time, the frontier of taste has moved into other territories that, if at first sight seem usual, are in fact explored with surprisingly sophisticated techniques and methods: they taste different types of coffee, for example, but also oil, honey, cheese, chocolate and even water. This has given rise to a new generation of sommeliers who, just like traditional, in-depth wine connoisseurs, are super-focused on every detail and sensitive interpreters of the individual peculiarities of products.
"For coffee, we prefer to speak of caffesperts," explains Godina, the first to use this term, and famous for his investigations on Rai3 dedicated to the quality of capsules. 'They are professionals capable of interpreting the raw material, describing and narrating it'. In Italia, the official training course is offered by Sca, the national division of the Specialty Coffee Association, which promotes technical tasting (the so-called cupping) and the mastery of the various extraction methods, from the mocha to the French press up to the pour-over, which means by percolation, i.e. hot water is poured slowly in circular movements onto the ground coffee contained in a cone with a filter.
"As with wine, the important thing is to taste as much as possible, one should never stop. I tasted at least 1,300 references last year,' says Godina.
But if the professional outlets so far have been rather traditional - coffee roasters, quality control laboratories, R&D for companies producing pods and capsules, imports of virgin coffee - today new and unexpected directions are opening up. Many fine dining restaurants offer real coffee charters, and even in Italia the philosophy of specialty coffees is beginning to spread, which indulge in extraction methods and raw material origins. And finally, people are starting to talk about food pairings. Illiano says: 'I decided to write a book on this and defined a method, a systematic study of combinations based on sensory analysis and the principles of concordance, contrast and emphasis, to understand the interactions between the organoleptic characteristics of coffee and those of food, whether sweet or savoury'. In his very recent book Coffee & Food Pairing, in fact, he outlines nine tasting rules through the analysis of the fundamental parameters for the ideal pairing: temperature, recipe and food preparation, coffee extraction technique, geographical origin of the varieties. "A few examples: a pizza Margherita will be perfect in the company of a single-origin 100 per cent Arabica from Ethiopia, Guatemala or Colombia, medium roasted, extracted in a moka or AeroPress (portable coffee maker that allows you to prepare an espresso anywhere): the notes of red fruits, honey and flowers, combined with a lively but balanced acidity, marry perfectly with the sweetness of the tomato, the creaminess of the mozzarella and the fragrance of the dough". And a spaghetti with clams? The answer is a washed Ethiopia, extracted in American, with citrus and white flower notes. A 100 per cent Arabica, preferably from Brazil or El Salvador, characterised by sweetness and round body, in mocha or even espresso, is ideal for a risotto. Fish tartare or butter and anchovy crostini, on the other hand, call for a cold brew, the 2.0 version of good old cold coffee.
The basis of every good cup, we know, is water. And here is even a German gentleman who dared to compare it to wine, demonstrating that it too should be tasted, matched, told, because it speaks of territories and ecosystems. There was a time when ordering water in a restaurant was simple: all you had to do was define whether it was natural or sparkling, cold or room temperature. Then came Martin Riese: born in Germany, raised professionally between luxury hotels and fine dining, he is a sommelier, but realises that the most neglected element of the gastronomic experience is the purest, water. So he began to study it almost obsessively: he read treatises on hydrogeology, visited springs, tasted hundreds of springs from all over the world. In 2008, he decided to make a career out of it and became a water-sommelier.
