If you've limited your food orders at Brasserie Du Vin to shareable finger foods for pau hana wine sessions — cheese plates and tarts — you can't really say you've experienced chef Scott Nelson's food. As discovered at a recent installment of Raisin d'Etre, the enigmatic chef with the haole name and Asian appearance, who once cooked at Duc's Bistro, lets loose for the restaurant's cleverly named Monday wine-pairing dinners.

Nelson's partner in wine for the event is sommelier Jason "Cass" Castle (who also writes periodic columns for The Advertiser). It's no easy feat to come up with a weekly menu of successful pairings, but the two do it. Nelson cooks up a few dishes and Castle brings out his gems and they settle on the best matches. For the last course, they offer two choices.

The restaurant e-mails out the upcoming offerings, and the dinner books up fast. Du Vin limits the number to 14 people to keep the quality up; Nelson doesn't want to be shoveling food out and Castle wants to be able to serve hard-to-get wines.

For example, the Dec. 10 dinner featured the small-production California wine Zaca Mesa Roussane and from Paso Robles Cass Winery's (no relation) Hacienda, which isn't available anywhere else in Hawai'i.

Nelson started off the dinner with sauteed seabream, a thin filet crisp on the outside and moist within, topped with grape halves and pine nuts sautéed in butter — an unusually sweet and indulgent choice for the fish, which worked, and seamlessly paired with the Mesa Roussane.

The second course of steamed black bass was pure France. Nelson stacked meaty pieces of fish in the subtle red pistou broth accented with capers, tomato bits, fennel and slivers of garlic and surrounded the whole thing with a halo of Salt Spring mussels. Castle's choice was the herbaceous Purisima Mountain Vineyard Marsanne from Rhône varietal king Beckmen Vineyards, where day-to-day winemaking is overseen by former Honolulu resident Mikael Sigouin.

Finally, out came a crisp textbook duck confit (with an addictive potato-crusted spinach and manchego cheese galette). It was sauced with what tasted like a thicker version of the bass' soup, an uninspired choice that didn't counterbalance the rich bird, but the big, fruity Hacienda made up for it. Castle also poured the more sophisticated Domaine LignEres PiEce de Roches from Languedoc, France, letting diners do their own taste test.

Throughout dinner, Castle visits the table, talks about the wines, where they're from, what the wineries are like (Beckmen is a winery with a "hands-on approach; when I visited them, the winemaker's clothing was stained red," Castle vividly described). He gives these talks in a chatty, no-attitude way reminiscent of master sommelier Chuck Furuya's approach. Can't taste the difference between the Hacienda and the PiEce de Roches? Castle won't scoff at you, he'll work with you. And his pours are generous and sometimes topped off — no 2-ounce limits here. And the dishes are no tasting plates; Nelson serves full portions.

Whether you're an oenoneophyte or a seasoned glass-swirler, Du Vin's Monday night dinners are a good place to learn pairing basics and get to know new wines. And to do it with Nelson's light, deft take on casual French food makes getting schooled delicious.

Lesa Griffith is a freelance writer in Honolulu whose reviews appear here monthly.

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