Competition challenges cooks to harmonize pizzas with port wine

It was a totally unlikely marriage. Like Cláudia Raia and Alexandre Frota. How to harmonize pizza with liqueur and sweet port wine? The white version is predominantly served as an aperitif, and the red version as a digestif.

The question ended up yielding a competition. The second edition of World Stars Pizza & Port Wine, which took place on November 16th, in the Portuguese city of Porto, had fourteen competitors (all with celebrated CVs) from Germany, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, United States , France, Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Portugal, Serbia and Sweden.

“I carried out a large worldwide consultation with friends and gathered only artists”, says pizza chef Antonio Mezzero, organizer of the event. “What I do is a real Pizza World Cup”.

There were three categories, and the main one, the pairing of pizza (which the Portuguese, by the way, pronounce ‘pisa’) with port wine, was won by the Brazilian representative Jaqueson Dichoff, one of only three who also competed in the first edition, in 2018.

For the pairing with Port wine, Jaqueson bet on a very Brazilian fruit. The winning pizza had Minas cheese, Mogiana cheese with annatto —which gave it a more orange appearance—, spicy salami and a special tomato, very sweet, grown by a couple (he Dutch, she Russian) in Andradas, in the interior of Minas Gerais.

On top, a light touch of coriander and cashew nut pesto, finished with jabuticaba jam from the Maria Preta brand, made in Campinas, and tulha cheese from Fazenda Atalaia, from Amparo, both in the interior of São Paulo.

Also included in the suitcase was an award-winning olive oil from Fazenda Irarema, in São Sebastião da Grama, 270 km from São Paulo. “The jabuticaba jam created an illusion of looking like an olive and that surprised the jury”, says Jaqueson. “In 2018, I had used jabuticaba jelly, which was sweeter than jam.”

There were pizzas with toppings of all kinds. Ali Chahrour, Swedish representative, used slices of reindeer meat, while German Tobias Kühnle put potatoes and caramel apples on his topping. The Italian Gianni Calaon, seven times world champion, appeared with a green pasta and explained to the judges that he had enriched it with spirulina.

Takumi Tachikawa, from Japan, used cod faces, which he bought when he arrived in Portugal — crazy things that, until then, it was thought that only pizza rodizio owners in Brazil would be capable of inventing.

Jaqueson left advertising and lived in Italy for two years to graduate from the Scuola Italiana Pizzaioli. He was already a partner in pizzerias, such as Vituccio, in Vila Ipojuca, in São Paulo, and today he travels around the country giving courses and consulting for those who want to enter the business.

In the first edition of World Stars, which had ten pizzaiolos, Jaqueson was eliminated in the first phase. This time, he studied every detail. “Since I knew that most of the judges would be Italian, I decided not to bring dried meat,” he says. “I thought they would find the taste strange.”

Mezzero acknowledged the Brazilian’s rise: “He came to win. He was the only one who asked me for contact details about the winemakers before getting on the plane.”

Here is an explanation of how the competition works. Each pizzaiolo “defends” a winery in the region. By mutual agreement, the pizza maker and the house winemaker decide which port wine and Douro wine will be paired with the pizzas.

In the draw, Jaqueson stayed with Ramos Pinto, which has a long tradition with the Brazilian market. Ramos Pinto was founded in 1880 and, in that year, it began to export its wine to Brazil. In 1889, Adriano Port wine was the first sold already bottled in Brazil. Adriano is the name of the founder, Adriano Ramos Pinto, who opened the business at just 21 years old.

In the beginning, port wine was presented as a tonic. A medicine indeed. In the Douro category, the wine chosen by Ramos Pinto was the Duas Quintas. When talking to winemaker Thomas Rogerson and export director Nuno Sampaio Maia, Jaqueson took the lead and began testing in São Paulo.

Gradually, people from Porto began to understand that pizza allows for an infinite world of combinations and, therefore, pairing with port wine was not so impossible.

In 2017, the Neapolitan Antonio Mezzero decided to subvert tradition and, on the International Day of Port Wine, celebrated on September 10, he presented two pizzas with this objective —one with a Portuguese accent (with mozzarella fior di latte, alheira , cured Alentejo goat cheese and Port wine reduction) and another with an Italian accent (with the same mozzarella, mortadella from Bologna, arugula, pistachio, porcini mushroom and parmesan).

The date is even registered on one of the walls of his pizzeria, opened in 2011, in the city of Matosinhos, in Greater Porto. The two pizzas, obligatorily accompanied by a glass of Port wine, have been on the menu ever since.

Mezzero arrived in Portugal 14 years ago and boasts of being the first to make Neapolitan-style pizza in the country. “I was born in Italy and I want to die in Portugal”, he says.

A slice of his family was part of the Casalesi clan, an arm of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia. The eponymous Antonio Mezzero, his father’s cousin and named as one of the bosses, was arrested for three homicides – he got a 55-year sentence in 1999 and was released last July, after serving 23 years.

In the early 1990s, the war between authorities and mafiosi scared Italians. Mezzero’s parents, Martino and Maria, were afraid that their five children would side with the mafia as well.

So they left a construction company behind and moved to tiny Waldshut-Tiengen in southern Germany. Mezzero was seven years old. The family had to start over from scratch.

In Portugal, Mezzero started working at his brother’s pizzeria, S. Martino, which now has 21 locations across the country. Until he got a loan from the Italian consul in the city to open his own house, with only ten seats. Three years later, Mezzero expanded the space to the current forty.

He removed Pizzeria Pulcinella from the facade to put his name, showing that the pizza was authorial there. For the long fermentation mass, for the ingredients and for his art. She became a celebrity.

Crazy about football, the Napoli fan conquered the palate of soccer players. The Brazilians Hulk and Alex Telles, who played for the Porto team, were regulars at the house and brought in Portuguese and foreigners. Several times clubs closed the pizzeria for title celebrations.

Today, in high season, there are those who wait two hours to get a table. It sells an average of 100 pizzas a night, with prices ranging from 15 to 27.50 euros (individual).

For the next edition of World Stars Pizza & Port Wine, initially scheduled for September 2024, Mezzero plans to bring two pizzaiolos from each country, one for each type of pairing. He also wants to make room for women.

“It’s hard to understand why we have so few women pizza makers in the world”, laments the Italian Simona Lauri, a master in baking and pizza, invited to be a judge in Porto. “It possibly came from the baking tradition, which was also male. But making pizza is a job with sensitivity, passion, everything to do with women.”

The reporter traveled at the invitation of the World Stars Pizza & Port Wine organization