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

http://www.gourmetsleuth.com/Articles/Wine-and-Alcohol-644/wine-and-food-pairings.aspx,31/10/2010

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
Start with the Wine
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.).
Three Key Points
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 Chardonnay Cabernet
Sauvignon Blanc Viognier Sauvignon
Pinot Noir Syrah
Sangiovese Zinfandel
Merlot
FOODS Salads/Vegetables Poultry, Game Birds, Pork, Beef, Offal
 Fish Veal
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).

On The Contrary
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.

FOOD AND WINE MATCHING

Food and wine matching is often cast as a rather mysterious science, but in truth it is actually
quite simple, and the experimentation involved is great fun. I have often thought that the
highest purpose for a wine is for it to be drunk with food in a situation where both complement
each other, and it still amazes me how often a rather humble wine will synergize with a food
match in a profound way. http://www.wineanorak.com/food.htm,31/10/2010, Jamie Goode,

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