Beer vs. Wine pairing dinners aim to challenge diners’ palates

There’s no entrance music, smoke machine or pyrotechnics, but Bill Carl and Adam La Cagnina provide enough good-natured, over-the-top trash talk during their Beer vs. Wine pairing dinners to draw comparisons to pro wrestling greats like Randy “Macho Man” Savage, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin or Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

“We play up the adversarial thing to make it more fun for the guests,” explained La Cagnina. “We’re both competitive, so underneath it all there is still that sense of wanting to win.”

“It’s more like old-school bare-knuckle boxing,” added Carl with a laugh. “How many times do you sit through a wine dinner and think towards the end, ‘How many jokes can a winemaker (tell)?’

“With these dinners it’ll be something we talk about for three weeks at work.”

Carl and La Cagnina sell beer and wine, respectively, for Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits. Carl is originally from Pittsburgh and has more than 20 years of experience in the beer industry; he first came to Hawaii in 2007 to work at a bar on Hawaii island before joining Southern as its Beer Portfolio Manager in 2013. La Cagnina is a certified sommelier from California with more than a decade of restaurant industry experience who also joined Southern in 2013.

The idea for Beer vs. Wine came about last year after the two were asked to help with a pairing dinner at a Chinatown restaurant. Each course was served with a glass of beer and wine; guests were asked at the end of the meal to decide which type of alcohol was the overall “winner” that night. While Carl got to pick the beers, La Cagnina was relegated to the sidelines as a spectator since the restaurant’s in-house sommelier chose the wines.

They’ve since hosted dinners at Livestock Tavern in Chinatown and DK Steakhouse in Waikiki, with Carl’s beer picks and La Cagnina’s wine choices each earning a victory and setting up last week’s dinner at The Tchin Tchin! Bar as the rubber match. Guests are now provided with poker chips of different colors and asked to choose which beverage they enjoyed more after each course.

“How it works is they give us a menu, Adam pairs a wine with each dish and I pair a beer with each dish,” said Carl. “What’s important is that the voting isn’t about what the guests like. It’s about pairing with the meal. We want guests to try the beer and wine with each dish. That’s the big thing.”

Added La Cagnina, “The wine drinkers come and think they’re going to like the wines, and a lot of the time they end up liking the beer pairings, and vice versa. You get a lot of reversals, and people surprise themselves. At first they take a sip of the beer or wine and decide whether or not they like it. But as the dinner progresses, they figure out that no matter what they think about that beer or wine, tasting it with food is going to change things.”

That’s exactly what took place last week at Tchin Tchin. When presented with glasses of Professor Fritz Briem 1809 Berliner Weisse and Flor Prosecco Rose, most of the early reaction was directed at how tasty the wine was on its own.

But when the first course — a watermelon salad with tomato, feta cheese and raspberry vinaigrette — arrived at the table, the consensus seemed to turn in favor of the German beer, which featured a tartness that paired nicely with all the ingredients on the plate. The process repeated itself three more times, with diners surprised by the way Carl and La Cagnina were able to challenge their palates and force them to reconsider the type of alcohol they’d normally choose while dining.

“It was really great to hear the response from the guests, who were mostly winers,” said Carl. “They were very surprised at how well beer can work with a meal when it was mostly assumed by them and their crew that wine is the one and only choice. … This is honestly my main objective with these dinners.”

In the end, however, it was La Cagnina’s wine selections that earned him the win by a single vote and putting him up 2-1 overall. The two will face off again at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 30 at Square Barrels, with the menu and alcohol pairings yet to be determined. Get the latest updates by following La Cagnina on Instagram (@surfinsomm) and Carl on Twitter (@dineanddraught), or email Carl at billcarl@sgws.com.

Jason Genegabus tracks the local bar and drink scenes in “Barfly” every Friday in TGIF. Read his blog at inthemix.staradvertiserblogs.com.