The more casual the party, the more you’ll enjoy it, and the more likely you are to have another, and that’s a good thing. So let’s say you’d like to have some friends over to enjoy some wine with you, but there’s no time to prepare a five-course meal. No problem.

Get some pies from the local pizzeria, or order takeout Chinese or Thai. Make the food the theme of the wine tasting. With pizza, buy an array of simple Chianti wines; with Chinese, make it Riesling. Put all the wines out in numbered paper bags, so no one can see the labels, and have people vote on their favorite. That way, you’ll not only eat and drink well, but you’ll casually have done some good wine study, too.

A food-and-wine party doesn’t need to be fancy. It can be as simple as some wine and some cheese, or dry sausages and bread. Give it extra interest by creating a theme— buy an array of American farmhouse cheeses, for example, and a selection of American wines to match. Or make it Spanish wine and Spanish cheese, or Italian cold cuts and red wines. Not only will it narrow the choices, making it easier to make your selections, but pairing wine with the foods that it grew up around greatly ups the chances that the two will go together well.

Maybe it sounds cheap, but it also sounds like a lot of fun. Pick a theme, any theme, and a price range, like $1 to $10, and ask everyone to bring a bottle. The theme could be the starring dish: say, a deep pan of lasagna. Or it could be a variety, like Merlot. Or it could be the movie you’re going to watch that night—anything from sultry wines with which to match a showing of Casablanca to wines that would pair well with buttered popcorn. (I mean it—there are some Chardonnays that go well with buttered popcorn.)

In order to keep competition down, you might want to paper-bag these wines, too. I know of some people who do this regularly, and award prizes (silly stuff, always) to the person who brings the most popular bottle. There’s always one bottle that goes faster than the others.

This is also a terrific way to learn about lots of wines at once: With 10 different Merlots, there are bound to be some clunkers. The few that are great you can add to your shopping list; the rest you never have to wonder about again.

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I’ve served good wine out of coffee cups, so don’t look to me for any lectures about how each wine deserves the perfect glass. Whatever you have on hand will do in a pinch. The only place I put my foot down is with Styrofoam cups: not only are they terrible for the environment, but their chemical smell and funny texture ruin what-ever’s put in them.

Beyond that, it’s a matter of getting as close to the ideal as you can, and having enough of them to go around. The ideal is a thin-lipped glass with pear-shaped bowl (to make it easier to swirl without spilling, and to capture aroma) and a stem (so that you don’t get fingerprints all over the bowl or warm the wine, if it’s been chilled). To get the most out of the wine, get at least a 10-ounce glass; that will leave enough room to swirl a few ounces of wine.

If you frequently drink sparkling wine, invest in some flutes. These tall, thin glasses are designed to channel the bubbles through the wine in a thin, steady stream—which is both beautiful and allows the bubbles to last longer.

White wine glass, red wine glass? Forget it. Traditionally, white wine is served in a smaller glass than red, but that tradition harks back to the advent of glassware, when the number of glasses on the table indicated status. White wine deserves as big a glass as red; the bigger the bowl, the bigger the swirl, and the more scent you can get out of it.

If you can spring for glasses, do so: Nothing beats glass in feel and neutrality of scent and taste. Buy more than you think you can possibly use. That way, when one breaks—which it will—you’ll have another just like it to replace it and not have to worry about that style being discontinued.

With wine and glasses in stock, you’re ready for anything.

A great place to look for glasses is restaurant supply houses. Every city has one; check the yellow pages or ask a local independent restaurant where they bought glassware. Supply houses will sell in bulk, which saves lots of money, and the glasses come in cardboard boxes, making them easy to store.

Uncategorized tips on wine glasses, wine glass, wine glassess

Here’s your chance to show off, or at least put your knowledge to the test. Invite some friends over, put on a wine-tasting party, or have a dinner with courses paired to the wines.

That might sound high-falutin’, but really, who doesn’t like good food and good wine? And why not take a little extra time to show off what you’ve slaved over in the kitchen to best effect? Or what you’ve ordered in from the Chinese takeout place uptown …

Inviting friends over for some grub and vino doesn’t have to be a big deal. God knows I’ve had plenty of spontaneous dinner parties which, caught off-guard, consisted of a bunch of cheese and wine drunk out of coffee cups, for that’s all I had. A little tacky, maybe, and not the best way to show off the wine, but fun—and that’s what counts most.

Still, you can prepare a little better than I did on those occasions. It takes just a few accoutrements—and every once in a while, it’s nice to do it up right. Invite some friends over, but plan what’s going to happen first.

Stocking the Pantry

My mom always had enough quick food in the house to be able to whip up dinner for 250 in the unlikely event that it would be needed without warning. I haven’t gotten that good, yet, but she did teach me the value of summer sausages, cheese, and crackers. And I’ve added my own list of wines.

With a little stash of good, everyday wines and the most basic of foods, there’s a party ready to happen whenever the chance occurs—even if it’s 11 P.M. after a movie and everyone’s a little hungry.

My basic batterie du vin tends to consist of …

• Two bottles cheap sparkling wine (Cava and Prosecco, mostly, simply because I’ve found nothing as consistently good for the $10 price).
• Two bottles light, crisp white wine (Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, white Bordeaux, Vinho Verde, Santorini, and the like).
• Two bottles juicy, ready-to-go red (Zinfandel, Shiraz, Valpolicella, southern Italian or French blends).
• One bottle sweet white wine (an affordable late-harvest something, or a Moscato d’Asti).
• One bottle sweet red wine (an LVB Port or Port-style Zinfandel, or a Maury when I’m feeling flush).

This way, no matter what the situation, there’s always something to pull out for guests. Somebody got some good news? A toast is in order, and the bubbly’s already in the fridge. It’s been a rough day? Bubbly can fix just about anything. Guests stopped in at dinner time? Have a glass of white while we fix another plate. One of these other whites or reds will do fine with the main. Out with friends at a show and there’s no place to go afterward? Invite them back for cheese or dessert: You’ve got some lovely sweet wines that have been waiting for an excuse to be opened.

No room in the fridge for all these tall bottles of wine? No problem. To chill a bottle quickly, put it into a container (or a plugged sink) filled partly with ice; fill it the rest of the way with cold water. This will chill the bottle far faster than straight ice or the freezer.

Spur-of-the-moment entertaining like a pro is as simple as having a few bottles tucked away—and something to pour them into, perhaps.

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Acidity

Acidity is the lemon squeeze of the wine world. It magnifies flavors, it brightens, it lightens, it almost makes the sun shine. Acidity cuts through fat like a knife. Think of that lemon squeeze over a fish fry; replace the lemon with a bright, crisp white wine, and the effect is very similar. It makes the heavy flavors feel livelier, and more importantly, it scrapes the film of fat off the taste buds so that they won’t get fatigued.

Acid will also magnify elements that don’t need magnifying—tannin, for instance. Pour a tannic red wine with an acid-rich sausage-and-sauerkraut dish, and every time the acid and wine combine the wine will seem extraordinarily tannic.

What works: High-acid wines with high-acid foods, or fat

What to avoid: High-acid wines with tannin

Oak

Wood has no equivalent in food, except for maybe those rare occasions when you’re having cedar-planked salmon. The flavors oak adds to wine range from near-nothing (in which case it’s no worry) to heavy vanilla and butterscotch notes. It also can add a little of its own tannin, a challenge covered previously under “Tannin.”

It’s the sweet vanilla, toast, and butterscotch flavors that are a concern. If the flavors are light, they might not interfere with the flavors in food, especially if the food itself is a little sweet or smoky, like, say, grilled tuna with mango relish.

If they are heavy, they’ll need a very rich dish to stand up to them, like barbecued brisket with sweet sauce for an oaky Shiraz.

Beware of salt when it comes to oaky wines, too, unless you want to taste even more of the oak and emphasize its tannins.

What works: Oaky wines with sweet or smoky dishes

What to avoid: Oaky wines and salty food, delicate flavors

As you can see, the reactions between food and wine can be dynamic. Knowing them can help you make sure the dynamic is a good one. Still, sometimes you’ll hit it and sometimes you won’t; not even sommeliers get it right every time. Worse things could happen. After all, it’s just dinner and a glass of wine.

Uncategorized parts of wine

Sometimes it’s easier to think about what the wine will do for the dish, rather than what the dish needs in a wine. For wine, you have just four basic things to worry about: tannin, alcohol, acidity, and oak.

Tannin

You won’t find much tannin in food, but it’s an important element to keep in mind when it comes to wine. Tannin dries out the mouth. The feeling can be pleasant, a light grip that keeps the wine’s flavors lingering, or it can be like super-strength Velcro, leaving the tongue feeling dry and fuzzy. You can use tannin’s power to your advantage with food—and it can also do some damage.

Tannin loves protein; it literally binds to it. If you drink a tannic wine without any food, the tannin will have nothing to bind to but the protein in your saliva—and thus the unpleasant drying feeling.

However, give that wine a steak to sink its tannin into, and the tannin will leave your tongue alone. They’ll work almost like tenderizers on the steak, making it go down more easily.

Since tannic wines usually have lots of flavor, they typically have the oomph to cut through super-rich dishes like blue-cheese burgers or cheesy, meaty lasagna. Sic those tannins on a popcorn shrimp, though, and they’ll destroy the little guy by sheer overwhelming power. Think of tannin as a wine’s muscles, and be careful with what it flexes them on.

The shrimp’s briny notes won’t do it any favors, either: Just as salt enhances flavors, it accentuates tannin, too. If you don’t want a wine to taste any more tannic than it already is, go easy on the salty foods.

What works: Tannin with protein (think steak or cheese) and big flavors

What to avoid: Tannin with delicate foods and salt

Alcohol

Alcohol falls only on the wine side of the food-and-wine equation, but it’s important to know how food can affect it. Alcohol stokes a fire in a wine, one that’s usually kept under wraps by the wine’s own sweet, ripe fruit flavors. Toss a hot pepper into a dish, though, and when the wine and pepper meet, a bonfire might start on your tongue, so keep some bread handy or, better yet, avoid fiery foods and wines with high alcohol. Opt for something lightly sweet and low-alcohol instead, like a German Riesling or a white Zinfandel.

Alcohol can also ignite a fight with salt, which will bring out the heat of a wine in a white pepper-like burn. In most foods, there are mitigating elements that keep this from being a problem, but if the dish of the evening is Chinese salt-and-pepper squid, a 15 percent alcohol Viognier is not a good bet.

High-alcohol wines are usually high in flavor, too, and they’ll often have a slightly thicker texture. This is excellent when the match in mind is something as rich as salmon with a cream sauce, but delicate dishes can get lost under that thick blanket of flavor.

What works: High-alcohol wines with fatty, flavorful food

What to avoid: High-alcohol wines and salty food or spicy-hot dishes, delicate dishes

Uncategorized parts of wine

Piquant Spice

Piquant spices, like chiles and pepper, add a bright, lively accent to foods. They also create a burning sensation on the tongue. To balance out spicy foods we often pair them with sweet notes: sweet and spicy Szechuan chicken, for instance, or sweet-hot barbecue sauce.

Wine can work with spice in the same way; use a sweeter wine to tamp down the fire. However, too much alcohol or too much spice, and the combination can start a bonfire in your mouth.

Tannin doesn’t do anything nice in the presence of spicy foods, either. Your tongue is already burning up; it needs something as quenching as a fire hose, not as parching as tannin’s drying effects.

What works: Piquant spice and sweetness

What to avoid: Piquant spice and alcohol, tannin

Sweetness

Sugar enhances flavors, magnifying them and making them feel softer and gentler (think of black versus sugared coffee). Sugar is tricky when it comes to matching wines, though—if the wine is too sweet, the combination can be cloying; if it’s too dry, the dessert will seem sweeter and the wine drier; neither item wins.

The answer? With desserts, look for wines that have plenty of acidity as well as sweetness; the acidity will help keep the overall sweetness in balance.

With savory dishes that have a sweet edge, like barbecued brisket with sweet sauce, that sweetness wants a wine that’s similarly balanced between sweet and savory— something soft and ripe, like an affordable California Zinfandel or Aussie Shiraz. Here, heavy tannin would only feel violent and miserly next to such sweetness.

What works: Sweet foods and sweet, high-acid wines or savory wines with ripe, soft flavors

What to avoid: Sweet foods and low acid or heavy tannin

Acidity

Acid is tough on wine; after all, its most frequent appearance in food is in salad, as vinegar, wine’s mortal enemy. Generally, it’s best to avoid highly acidic foods when you want to drink wine, but if you’re going to do it, and we all are, then fight acidity with acidity, and find a wine with the acidity to match.

Otherwise, the acidity in the dish will slay a soft wine, making it feel flabby in comparison.

What works: Acidity with acidity

What to avoid: Acidity without acidity

Uncategorized tasting wine and food

Fat

Fat comes in many guises. It can be blatant, like the sizzling, juicy fat edging a steak, or a cream sauce napping a pork chop. It can be more hidden, like within the richness of goose meat, or in the dry crispiness of a French fry. Wherever it appears, it adds richness.

Fat can put up a barrier to a wine, though, as it coats the taste buds and makes it hard to perceive delicate flavors. Rich, fatty foods need wines that have enough flavor and enough acidity to cut through the fat and announce themselves. A wine with good acidity can cut through that fat like a squeeze of lemon on fried fish, making it feel less rich and heavy (and, typically, inspiring you to eat more). The danger is when the wine doesn’t have enough acidity, and the combination collapses under its own weight.

What works: Fatty foods and high-acid wines

What to avoid: Fatty foods and low-acid wines

Salt

Salt magnifies flavor, until there’s too much of it, at which point everything just tastes like salt. Before that point, though, it’s a very dynamic element, almost like acidity in its action.

That acid-like feel is good to keep in mind when it comes to pairing with wines, as salty foods tend to taste even more addictive with high-acid wines. Think Champagne and caviar or potato chips; think Cava and the salty snacks that accompany it at the bar in Spain; think seaside restaurants serving ocean fish and crisp white wines.

Salty food can also enhance the flavor of a wine, a good thing unless there are elements that don’t need exaggeration. Tannin in particular gets more unpleasant in the presence of salty things—makes sense, right, since both of them are dehydrating? Also, if a wine is very oaky and you don’t want the oak flavors emphasized any further, then don’t drink it with salty foods.

What works: Salty foods and high-acid whites

What to avoid: Salty foods and tannic reds, oaky wines

Uncategorized tasting food and wine

Typically, in the United States at least, a dinner entree contains a protein, two vegetables, and a starch, not to mention accompanying sauces and seasonings. Finding a wine to match every single item on that one dish is an Olympic feat, probably truly impossible most of the time. What to do? Break it down.

Ask yourself, is it a rich dish? A lean dish? Acidic? Sweet? What you’re looking to describe is the overall feel of the dish, not individual flavors. That would drive you nuts.

Besides, what really matters in pairing wine and food is how a few dynamic elements of flavor balance. Pay attention to …

• Fat (richness).
• Salt (like chips or cured ham).
• Piquant spice (like chiles).
• Acid (like vinegar, lemons).
• Sweetness (like fruit salsas, brown sugar glazes).

Wine shares most these elements with food, only it adds …

• Tannin: feels like Velcro, both in how it sticks a wine’s flavors to the tongue and how it leaves the tongue feeling.
• Alcohol: can add richness to texture, or, in excess, a warm burn like that of white pepper.
• Oak: adds a bit of tannin, some sweetness, and sometimes flavors of straight wood.

The most important elements to pay attention to in pairing wine and food are the acidity, tannin, alcohol, and any overt wood flavors in the wine.

Each one of these elements plays a dynamic role in flavor—it enhances, magnifies, or suppresses it—and in how food and wine feel in the mouth—smooth, rough, hot, or sticky. These are all feelings that can be unpleasant in excess (too much salt, for instance, or too much drying tannin). They are also elements that can clash or work to each other’s strengths. Knowing a little bit about how they combine will help you to make choices that work more often than not.

Uncategorized tasting wine and food

It sounds corny, but what grows together often goes together. It makes sense, too— the land in any particular place supports only so many crops, which in turn inspires the local cuisine. Chiles, for instance, don’t tend to grow in wine-growing regions. That’s not to say that wine doesn’t go with chile-spiked food, but chiles often do pose a challenge to wine. Beer, on the other hand, has historically been made where chiles grow, and is the no-brainer match.

What people eat in a particular place also affects what wines they make. The wines, in a sense, are preselected to go with the cuisine. For instance, Galicia’s fish-based cuisine seems perfectly suited to its light, fresh white wines, and even the few red wines Galicia claims are so light they are almost white. Sure, climate has something to do with it, but you’ve got to think that the vintners also made some good choices. Wine is made to drink with food, and light white wines are what they wanted to drink.

Tuscany is another good example—heavy pasta, tangy, high-acid tomato sauce: This isn’t food that needs a rockin’ red wine. It needs something medium-bodied with good acidity, with flavors that will bridge the whiteness of pasta and the redness of tomato sauce. Hey, look—that describes Chianti, Tuscany’s main wine.

Think of classic pairings, and you can learn something from each one of them (even if it’s just that you don’t like it).

Champagne and caviar: This illustrates best the power of expensive wines and expensive food: whether or not it’s a great match, it sure says “celebration” like little else. You could also make an argument for texture, as good caviar bursts like little Champagne bubbles on the tongue.

Muscadet and oysters: Muscadet is the region around where the Loire River flows into the Adantic— home to oyster beds galore. The wine—light, crisp, and mineral-tinged—seems made for washing down cold oysters filled with the salty flavor of the sea.

Chablis and oysters: Chablis might be far removed from the ocean, but not as far as it looks on the map. The area where the wines of Chablis grow used to be an ocean bed, and the soil is still filled with ancient oyster shells. The wines seem to pick up a bit of chalky, oyster-shell flavor, too—which makes them great pairings with oysters themselves.

Chianti and pizza or red-sauced pasta: Tomatoes are acidic, and that acid can be tough on a red wine unless it has acid to compete. Traditional Chianti does.

Gewurztraminer and choucroute: Alsace’s famous sauerkraut-and-sausage dish has no better match than one of the region’s Gewurztraminers. The wine has both the acidity to cut through the richness of the dish and the body to stand up to it.

Fino Sherry and olives, chips, and other salty snacks: Visit a bar in Spain, and along with tapas—those little plates of salty and often fried snacks—people will be drinking Fino Sherry (or Cava). The wine’s extremely high acidity and salty tang cut through the richness of the food and make for an addictive pairing.

Port and Stilton: Big, sweet red wine and big, stinky, sweet-tangy cheese—it’s a match that goes so well together that some people actually make a hole in the cheese and pour the wine in. It’s volume that counts most of all here: Both of these have very big, mouth-filling flavors and rich, palate-coating textures. Sweetness counts, too, to play off the cheese’s tang.

There are classic pairings, but there are no such things as correct pairings. If you like oysters and red wine, go for it. There are no rules; only suggestions.

Uncategorized classic pairings, pairing food and wine

You know far more about pairing food and wine than you probably think. You know, for instance, that a big glass of dense, dark red wine isn’t going to look very refreshing on a 95 degree day. In fact, you’ll probably want to reach for a beer. So on those hot days, think light, crisp whites, like unoaked Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs. No doubt you’ve already chosen light foods.

Same thing goes for wintertime. If you’re starting dinner with a white wine, you might want to look toward richer whites, like toasty oaked Chardonnay or lush Rhones.

An easy way to think about what wines fit the climate is to think of what people drink in like climates. Summertime whites? Think of the Mediterranean. Wintertime reds? Think of northern Italy, and central and northern France. It’s not infallible, but it’s a good trigger when you’re feeling lost.

Guided by Vibe

This is a bit of a no-brainer: Match the wine to the vibe of the occasion. For instance, burgers and Grand Cru Bordeaux can be a wonderful match, especially if the burgers are served on bone china at a clothed table. In the backyard, fancy Bordeaux not only has the possibility of looking pretentious, but the wine will probably be wasted on people since the spread won’t feel like an occasion to pay much attention to what’s in your glass. Bulgarian Merlot might just be a better pick.

Weigh the Choices

You can answer many wine-pairing questions simply by asking yourself how weighty the dish is. Take a nice filet of sole with a butter sauce, for instance. How about a big, juicy Shiraz with that? I didn’t think so. The wine is going to knock that fish right out of the sea, not because it’s a red wine with white fish, but because the wine’s flavors are simply bigger, louder, more aggressive. How about a big, oaky Chardonnay? Better, but that’s still going to clobber the delicate sole. A wine as delicate and plain as the fish itself, like a crisp, unoaked Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, sounds far better.

There are very few rules in pairing wine and food, but this is one of them: Match the weight of the wine to that of the food. If the wine is too heavy, it will obliterate the dish; too light, and the dish will obliterate it. Give them each a fighting chance to be tasted, and you’re halfway there, or more.

Texture

We tend to think of wines as simply wet, but when you get down to it, some are smooth as silk; others are heavier, more like satin. Some are rough with sandpaper-like tannins; others use bubbles to more genteelly rough up the tongue.

Think of a food’s texture when you’re pairing it with wine, and ask yourself whether you’d like more of the same, or some point-counterpoint. This isn’t the sort of interaction that will ruin a pairing, but it might make it more interesting. For example, with a smooth, rich pate, which would you rather have—a sweet wine as smooth and rich as the spread, or a bubbly that will scrub it off? One isn’t more correct than the other; they’re just different pleasant effects.

Uncategorized food and wine, pairing food and wine, pairing wine