An Argentinean Mismatch

One of the things I pride myself on is the ability to match food with wine. I tend to think that I have a good sense of flavor memory, not only for the wines I have had before, but also for food. Last night, I had a big ol' "swing and a miss". For dinner, I had prepared a seared flank steak with a chimichurri sauce. If you have never tried chimichurri, it is a combination of fresh parsley, garlic, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and a couple of other things that is popular in Argentina. Since we were having a steak with a preparation from down South, I figured that a wine from Argentina would go best with it. That's one way to cheat on food and wine pairing- look for wines that are indigenous to the area that you are making the food from. I chose a 2008 malbec from Ben Marco, one of my favorite Argentinean producers. In this case, it simply didn't match well. Both were delicious in their own right. I was hoping that the malbec was still a little "green" to go with the parsley, but it wasn't. It was dark, smoky, and had amazing red fruit components to it. The steak preparation was bright, fresh, and green. These are just two flavor profiles that tend to clash a little bit. In retrospect, I would have been better served to do something with a little more acid- maybe a rose of malbec (there are good ones out there from Crios and from Vida Organica.)
Oh well, I'm sure even Picasso had a bad day once.