Wine and Food Pairings 101
Just as a recipe doesn’t have to be complex to be mouth-wateringly good, you don’t have to be a wine connoisseur or gourmet cook to enjoy the benefits of the right wine pairing.Article: By Geyser Peak
Article by: Barbara Bowman
Related Videos Pairing Foods With Wine
Pairing foods with wines 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 of both food and wine.
And, just as a recipe doesn’t have to
be complex to be mouth-wateringly 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 the food, the wine and how the components and flavors in each
interact can make it easy to find a successful pairing on a daily basis, and can
greatly increase the chances of finding an exciting synergy between wine and
food
When you’re first trying your hand at 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 bottle
of wine!
Be ‘Prepared’ With The Food
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 in restaurants 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.).
To keep in mind when selecting the food are
1. The
food item being paired;
2. The cooking method of that item; 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
their pungency. To help keep things simple as you get started, we’ve put
together the following guide. Like anything, these are not absolute rules, but
good guidelines to follow to help create the most successful and interesting
pairings.
| FLAVORS | Delicate | Earthy; Hearty | Meaty Pungent Spicy |
| WINE TYPE | Riesling
Sauvignon Blanc | Chardonnay
Viognier
Pinot Noir
Sangiovese
Merlot | Cabernet Sauvignon
Syrah
Zinfandel |
| FOODS | Salads/Vegetables Fish | Poultry, Game Birds, Pork, Veal | Beef, Offal |
| SAUCES | Lemon based | Butter; Cream | Meat
Wine Demiglace |
| PREPARATION | Poached/Steamed | Sautéed Baked Roasted | Grilled Braised |
For a more comprehensive chart, check out our Wine and Food Pairing Chart
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.
As we noted, it’s not critical that you memorize this guide and follow it to the letter. The important point is to use this to help learn how the different types of flavors pair with different wines. This understanding of food components and wine flavors is actually much more helpful that simply matching a food to a wine and the basic chicken breast is a great example of why.
Imagine a chicken breast poached (i.e. cooked in water) with a light lemon herb sauce. This might be a dish that could be friendly 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).
In addition to marrying foods with complementary wines, many people like to
create a contrast between various components in the dish and the wine in much
the same way that you would balance sweet dessert recipe with a tangy sauce.
This is as simple as enjoying a crisp acidic wine like a Sauvignon Blanc to cut
through a very buttery sauce, or possibly a more oaky Chardonnay with a very
tart or sweet dish.
The result is different, but the approach remains
the same – consider the flavor of both the wind and food to create a specific
taste experience.