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