Wine And Food Pairing

Many people are intimidated by the task of selecting a wine and food pairing. Here we intend to provide a simple guide that will enable anyone to feel confident enough to choose a wine that will impress their dinner guests. The focus is on French and Italian wines, but many of these grapes are grown throughout the world.

Wine and food pairing is very much like discovering wonderful new recipes. Just as the right combination of ingredients complements and highlights each other to create a gourmet dish, pairing the right wine with a meal creates a combination that celebrates and enhances the experience.

And, just as a recipe doesn’t have to be complex to be good, you don’t have to be a wine connoisseur or gourmet cook to enjoy the benefits of the right wine pairing.

A basic understanding of how the food and the wine interact can make it easy to find a successful pairing, and can greatly increase the chances of finding an exciting synergy between the two.

Start with the Wine

When you’re first trying your hand at wine and food pairing, we recommend starting with a wine and then selecting and creating the food around it. The simple reason for this is that it’s much easier to tweak a food recipe to make it more compatible with the wine, than it is to start blending your own wines.

Pick a wine you know and love already. This way, you’ll have a sense of its flavors already, which you can use as a starting point to experiment with food pairings. Plus, if the recipe doesn’t work, at the very least you’ll be able to enjoy a nice wine.

How Is The Food Being Prepared?

Forget the white wine with white meat and red with red meats. The best place to begin your food selection is with an understanding of how the food is being prepared – the components and flavors in the dish that are integral to pairing it with wine.

This is why food and wine pairing can be challenging. You think that everything will be fine and then discover that the dish has a different;

flavor (Why did the chef add olives, they didn’t mention them on the menu?),

texture (Wow, I didn’t know that the sea scallops and bay scallops are so different!),

or cooking method (I expected the chicken to be grilled, but it is poached).

Three Key Points to keep in mind when selecting the wine and food pairing are:

1. The food being paired;

2. The cooking method; and

3. The additional flavors or sauces

The fundamental rule is to begin by pairing delicate wines with delicate flavors, medium-bodied wines with medium-weight or intensity flavors, and strongly flavored foods with wines that will stand up to them.

To help keep things simple, I have found the following guide as part of an article in Wine Enthusiast. Like anything, these are not absolute rules, but good guidelines to follow to help create the most successful and interesting pairings.

To make the wine even more compatible you can use the sauce to try to imitate flavors in the wine. For instance, mushrooms work well with Pinot Noir, tomatoes with Sangiovese, herbs and mint with Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, and dark berries with Shiraz. If your recipe calls for a wine, ALWAYS use the same wine in cooking that you'll be serving with the meal.

It's not critical that you memorize this guide or follow it to the letter. The important thing is to use it to help learn how the different types of flavors pair with different wines. This understanding of wine and food pairing is actually much more helpful than simply matching a food to a wine.

Example

Imagine a poached chicken breast (i.e. cooked in water) with a light lemon herb sauce. This might be a dish that could do well with light to medium bodied white wines like Pinot Gris and Sauvignon Blanc.

Now add a cream sauce and you can move up in body to a fuller bodied wine, maybe a Chardonnay. Or try it roasted and suddenly the flavors are such that it can marry with light to medium bodied reds, like Pinot Noir or Sangiovese. Grill it and it becomes great with fuller bodied reds, even Zinfandel or Shiraz (Syrah).

While there are no set rules for pairing wine with food, generally a full-bodied red wine should accompany rich and seasoned food. White wines are better suited for lighter fare.

These are some wine and food pairings for French and Italian wines:

Beef = Amarone (a full-bodied red)

Cheese = Beaujolais (a light red)

Chicken = Chardonnay

Cold Meats = Tavel

Chile = Grumello

Chinese Food = Soave

Clams and Oysters = Champagne

Duck = Pouilly-Fume

Fish = Muscadet

Ham = Pinot Grigio

Lamb = Saint-Emilion

Osso Bucco = Barbaresco

Pate = Saint-Veran

Pork = Pouilly-Fuisse

Red Sauce = Chianti

White Sauce = Pinot Grigio

Sauerbraten = Riesling

Shell Fish = Gavi

Steak = Gattinara

Stew = Barolo

Veal = Soave and

Venison = Pomerol

In the end, it is really a matter of personal preference and what suits your palate. If your restaurant does not have these particular recommendations in their wine cellar, you can always ask the sommelier to recommend something comparable.

These suggestions should enable you to at least buy the proper wine to accompany dinner. Enjoy!

Don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions about wine and food pairing by clicking here.

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