On pizza, guanciale and wine

I never know what wine to drink with pizza. I have had a long fondness for beer with my pizza, but generally only draft beer, for reasons I cannot explain except that I drank a lot of draft in West Philadelphia, Princeton and Highwood (Ill.) bars with pizza in the 1980’s and 1990’s. The beer wasn't usually very good (Rolling Rock, Stroh’s), but then neither was the ‘za (an old Nassauian bit of slang, that); still, they seemed to do well together. (The Blatz dark at Buffo’s in Highwood especially so.)

But when confronted with good pizza, I am often at a loss. (I should say right away that none of this applies to Chicago deep-dish pizza, which is a huge favorite of mine and goes well with beer, almost any beer [I like Goose Island or Old Style]; I couldn’t imagine drinking wine with deep-dish.) Good, thin-crust, wood- or coal-oven baked pizza: I love it. What wine goes with it?

I don’t know. I’ve tried Chianti, Beaujolais-Villages, Chinon, Lambrusco, Uruguayan tannat, Cotes de Provence rose, Zinfandel, even cava, and nothing seems to be spot-on. A good lager or pilsner are, but I’d love to find a wine to match.

So when confronted with a wood-baked thin-crust pie topped with homemade guanciale (cured meat from the pig’s jowl) and egg in Brooklyn recently, I hoped I had found my answer in a well-aged (2000) Barbera d’Asti from a friend’s cellar.

Verdict: outstanding pizza, good wine, bad match, again. Sigh. Pizza rocked, tangy, spicy, the meat, a real revelation, never had it before, like luxury bacon spiked with cloves, the egg a neat touch, loved the tomatoes and the tangy cheese slathered on the almost-perfect crust (a little soft in the center but the edges, woof).

The wine, from Prunotto, was dark, inky, austere, deep, not a whole lot of fruit, tannic, gripping, dry in that thirst-inducing way Piedmontese wines can be. Together, they quarreled, the pizza’s fresh flavors warring with the wine’s deep austerity. The wine needed mushrooms, or spicy meat. The pizza needed, well, I’d have settled for some of that old Blatz Dark with it, I think. The hunt continues.

2000 Prunotto Barbera d'Asti: **1/2 (at Roberta’s [well worth a visit at the Morgan Ave. L train stop, get pizza, chocolate-amoretto cake and the cheese plate] Bushwick, Brooklyn, 4/2008).