From Cape Town to Chicago – The iPad is the Choice But for How Long ???
Choosing a wine that is well matched to the food you are ordering is getting a lot easier thanks to technology… wherever you might be. Mike Bampfield-Duggan at iafrica.com and Michael Austin at the Chicago Sun Times both give an interesting take on how the iPad is being used to make our selections more easily and hopefully more enjoyable.
In 20 years, or even 10, this little story is going to be comically obsolete or downright cringe-inducing.
Like when my brother, as a college student circa 1980, won a Betamax machine from a radio station in Phoenix. He sold that hulking box to a doctor for $1,000 – college kids need beer money – and about two years later the machine was comically obsolete. Surely that doctor cringed when VHS machines took over.
Not long ago, I ordered wine from an iPad at Chicago Cut Steakhouse, 300 N. La Salle. A century or more of tradition was supplanted by this little glowing tablet in one swoosh. The wine list – heretofore hand-written, typed or typeset and printed, and bound in leather, paper or wood – was now illuminated and interactive.
Chicago Cut was not the first restaurant to use this technology to catalogue wines, but that was my first touch of an iPad. I am not opposed to or afraid of technology, but I don’t really use much of it on my own.
When I double-tapped photos of wine bottles, tasting notes from the winemakers popped up. In some cases, photographic maps of vineyards appeared and, in at least one instance, a video featured a winery representative offering food pairings from Chicago Cut’s menu for that specific wine. The four choices ran from decadent ribeye all the way down to humble sliders.
- Michael Austin
An invitation to attend the launch of the first South African digital wine and food menu created thoughts of eating and drinking in cyberspace… I was curious, so accepted.
The venue was the recently opened Johan’s At Longridge Restaurant at the Longridge Wine estate in Stellenbosch, where I was relieved to find that we still sat at tables with a normal place settings.
What was different, however, was the menu – instead of the usual leather-bound paper variety, the menu and wine list are digitally programmed by SAWI (South African Wine Index) on an Apple iPad. Heavier than the paper variety, it took a little time to get used to the “weight” of the menu as opposed to the paper alternative, but it proved a lot of fun exploring all the options in this way.
For the benefit of showcasing what could be achieved by pairing wine and food using the iPad, a set menu, prepared by Dutch Chef Marissa Chandansing, offered three wines per course from the Longridge stable of fine wines.
- Mike Bampfield-Duggan
As Michael Austin points out Betamax style… going forward, the iPad and this type of technology in general and the benefits it brings to us is only going to get better if, and this is a big if imo, restaurants have the wines paired to the specific dishes of their restaurant.
Photo credit Charles Rex Arbogast
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