10 Tips to remember when pairing food and wine
Every food has a variety of ideal wine matches. Once you understand how and why certain flavor elements in wines and foods complement one another, the process of creating a menu begins to feel natural and intuitive. Here are 10 pairing basics to help de-mystify your next matchup.
When devising food and wine pairings, the wine’s purpose is to complement the meal, rather than it being the meal’s purpose to complement the wine. Always aim to match wine to food, never food to wine.
Food has a greater effect on the taste of wine than the reverse. Foods with significant sweetness, umami & chile heat intensify the palate’s perception of acidity, bitterness, and alcohol burn in wines, while diminishing perception of the wine’s fruit notes, body, and sweetness.
Salty foods tend to increase the palate’s perception of a wine’s body while lessening perception of the wine’s bitterness and acidity. When pairing salty dishes, select a sufficiently acidic wine, or it will taste flabby and overpowered by the food.
Bitterness in food intensifies perception of bitterness in any wine drunk with it, and makes the wine taste more acidic. Salty dishes mask perception of bitterness in wines.
Highly acidic dishes like those made with tomatoes or citrus elements heighten the palate’s awareness of a wine’s sweetness, body, and fruitiness. These same foods tend to diminish perceptions of acidity in wine.
Because fat binds tannin, a highly tannic wine makes an excellent pairing for rich dishes featuring the likes of pasta and cheese, wild game, cured and red meats, or other foods with generous fat content.
Avoid high-tannin red wines with fish dishes. Tannin reacts with iodine in seafood to make both the wine and food taste metallic and unpalatable. If you must have red wine with fish, choose a lighter-bodied, low tannin, high acid one, like Beaujolais and lighter Pinot Noir.
When pairing wines with desserts courses, make certain to select a wine that matches or exceeds the level of sweetness in the dessert, or else the wine will taste flat and dull by comparison.
When serving a food with more than one dominant flavor element, select a wine that plays well with each aspect. Read More
