We’re not on the same level as Spain of course, but Belgium has quite a reputation in the field of food pairing and the molecular analysis of flavours and flavour combinations.
One of the key persons in this movement is Bernard Lahousse, a bio-engineer who runs a food consultancy company called Sense for Taste and organises The Flemish Primitives, a congress about new developments in gastronomy.
He also developed the Food pairing website where you can find a database of flavour molecules in ingredients and the combinations that go well with it.
Recently he has worked around wine & food pairing, but he also teamed up with Dave Broom to develop a new whisky wheel. While this was created primarily for the cocktail summit Bar.10, it’s still interesting for whisky lovers to have a look at it.
It’s based around the molecules in whisky, rather than the resulting taste. For instance you will find “mango” several times, depending on the different molecules causing this association. Great background knowledge, I would say.