Wine and Food Pairing
Wine and food pairing guidelines
Why do we even worry about trying to pair wine with foods? The object is to use the wine to enhance the taste of the food.
Rules made to be broken are called "guidelines." |
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The overall dining experience with a good pairing should be much more memorable that having either the wine or the food alone. A poorly thought out wine-food pairing can actually detract from both the food and the wine, 1 + 1= 0 or 1. A good pairing is 1 + 1 = 2 but with a great pairing, 1 + 1 = 3.
The key to a great wine and food pairing is balance. The pairing is a success if:
- You can taste both the food and the wine without one overpowering the other.
- The wine and food together bring out something new in either the wine or food that wasn’t present before. As an example, a Riesling wine will bring the sweet, juicy flavor of white peaches to an aged Gruyère cheese or an acid wine (that isn't your favorite wine) tastes much better because of having it with an acidic food.
- You are happy, and your guests are happy. Because ultimately, it’s all a matter of personal preference.
Here are a few rules to keep in mind when matching or recommending what wine or type of wine to have with food.
1) It is easier to pair food and wine that are themselves in balance.
If a food is even slightly out of balance, you should be more careful with the wines you choose to pair with the food. If a food or dish has a "hard" mouth-feel, it should be paired with a wine that has a "hard" mouth-feel to match the food, i.e., hard with hard, and soft with soft. A hard wine detracts from a soft food and vice versa.
2) Full-bodied wines should be paired with full-bodied food dishes or sauces, medium bodied wines with medium bodied dishes or sauces and light-bodied wines should be paired with light-bodied foods and sauces.
If the body or "heft" of a wine is not similar to the body or fullness of a food dish, the pair will be out-of-balance and either the wine or the food will taste flabby.
Whenever the sauce becomes the primary flavor in a dish rather than the meat, it is best to pair the wine with the sauce. This is especially true with lighter meats such as chicken or pork that have sauces, butter or oils that predominate the meat taste. Thus a savory sauce could be paired with a savory red wine such as a Merlot even if the meat is white.
3) Pair acidic dishes with a slightly less acidic wine.
If you have a tart dish with no sweetness to balance, it is better to pair that with one of the more acidic wines. There are two reasons for this. The slightly less acid level in the wine brings the acidic food more into balance and secondly, the acid in food cuts the acidity in wine. If the wine is low in acid to begin with, and you cut it even further, the wine will seem flat. If there is some sugar to balance the acid in the dish, there are many more wines available to match it.
4) A sweet food is best paired with a wine that is slightly less sweet.
Sweetness in food decreases a wine's fruit flavors and therefore some of the sweetness in wine. Sweet foods can make the wine taste tart or even sour -- unless the wine has some sweetness of its own. If you want to pair a dessert wedding cake with a Champagne, you would choose a an off-dry or semi-sweet sparkling wine because the cake sugar needs to have some sugar in the wine to match it. A dry (brut, brut natural, extra brut) Champagne would be out of balance with a sweet cake. The reason you pair a sweet dessert with a less sweet wine is because it is very easy to overwhelm the sweet taste buds and make everything out of balance
5) Low alcohol wines pair better with spicy foods.
Alcohol tends to accentuate the oils that cause a food to be spicy. For this reason, beer at alcohol levels of 5-7% tends to go better with hot, spicy foods than most wines. A low alcohol Moscato d' Asti can counterbalance spiciness like a curry or stir fry. A low alcohol (12% or below) Riesling even without residual sweetness would match spicy Asian dishes or Latin American dishes much better than even a spicy Syrah at 14% alcohol. Conversely, do not pair a high alcohol wine with a spicy dish unless you want it to taste even spicier.
6) Wines with residual sugar or perfumey/spicy aromas can pair well with spicy foods.
In addition to benefitting from lower alcohol wines, spicy foods seem to mesh well with sweeter wines such as German Rieslings, Muscat-based wines, any vinifera wines with flowery aromas such as Gewürztraminer or Torrontés and the muscadine/scuppernong wines of eastern United States. Sweetness seems to counterbalance cayenne-type spiciness and flowery aromas counterbalance spicey aromatic foods such as black pepper, chili spices, cajun spices, curry, cumin, etc.
7) Rich, tannic red wines typically go well with red and fatty meats. The astringency of tannins gives a dry, hard mouth-feel which complements the savory flavor of red meats unless they have sweet or acid sauces on them. Tannins also bring sauces that are too oily, fatty or buttery into balance.
8) Lighter red wines can be paired with white meats.
This is really the match-the-body-of-the-food-with-the-body-of-the-wine rule. Sometimes red wines go well with white meat like chicken or pork but in general it should be a lighter red wine such as Pinot Noir, Red Burgundy, Beaujolais, Grenache, a light Chianti, a Pinotage or a Bardolino from Italy. If a light red, slightly acidic wine is paired with fish, the sauce on the fish should have some acid along with any savory component.
9) Tannins increase the savoriness of a dish.
Tannins form strong complexes with proteins and other macromolecules in food and although the exact mechanism is not known, it somehow makes the food more savory probably by removing some of the acid and increasing a soft mouth feel due to the tannins that are bound with proteins.
10) Tannins increase bitterness in a food.
Tannins are perceived as bitterness by most people. Apparently the bitterness is additive to food bitterness so that the rule is the opposite of pairing sweet with sweet and acid with acid.
11) Very salty foods increase the perception of bitter tannins.
Somehow salt breaks up the complexes that tannins form and the raw tannins are perceived as bitter. This is not a very important rule since many modern wine styles have lower levels of tannins and chefs have cut back on salt. However pairing an old Barolo wine (very tannic) with potato chips is not a good pairing.
12) A sweet wine can counterbalance saltiness.
Blue Cheese is actually a bitter and salty cheese. One of the great wine-food pairings that seems counterintuitive is to have it with a sweet wine like a German Riesling or French Sauternes or any sweet dessert wine. A somewhat sweet Tawny Port, Malvasia Maderia or Sweet Marsala wine goes well with salted nuts. German Rieslings even pair well with salty pretzels.
13) Wine acids increase sweetness, savoriness and bitter food components.
This is the main reason that wines enhance any food. They release saliva which in turn breaks down food and releases flavor. The only pairing this rule suggests to drink wine with your food any chance you can get.
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