InterWined.com’s Food & Wine Pairing Guide

The Internet is full of hints, tips, and ideas; but no matter how experienced the sommelier, posh the restaurant, or sound the advice, the simple truth is that matching food with wine remains a skill most often shrouded in mystery, but easily uncovered with a measure of inspiration and and a simple golden rule.

External factors such as the differences in years and yields, vintages and winemakers, the quality of produce and ingredients, cooking times, and countless other little things will always make certain the inexactness of food & wine pairing. Simply put: sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. And, while some wines compliment some foods better than others, there are remarkably few, if any, real rules that govern the relationship between food and wine beyond this one. Essentially, it’s a matter of taste — both in terms of personal preference and the tongue.

As schoolchildren across the world can attest, there are five sensations that inform our sense of taste (especially in food): sweet, sour, bitter, umami (let’s call that savoury), and salty.

In wine, these taste sensations roughly translate as sweet, acidic, tannic, weighty, and utterly unmatchable — wine can do many things (inspire poets, help the heart, and so on) but it cannot do salty.

The Golden Rule of Food & Wine Pairing

When pairing food & wine the only real rule is to try and establish a balance between the taste of the food, the taste of the wine, and your own personal preference.

Sweet Food Likes Sweet Wine

Sauternes might pair with Foie Gras to perfection and sweet Muscat and botrytis marry well with eggs, but they’re all called dessert wines for a reason.

Acidic/Sour Food Likes Acidic Wine

Here’s an experiment that proves the point:

Take a glass of Sauvignon Blanc (a high acid wine often described as lemony) and a freshly sliced lemon (a recognisably high acid fruit never described as Sauvignon Blancy). Lick the lemon; then sip the wine. You’ll find that the acid in the lemon and the acid in the wine balance in the mouth. After sipping the wine, the acidity of the lemon has mellowed and the flavour balanced.

Bitter Food Hates Tannic Wine

Just as bitter food can cause the lips to purse, tannic wine accounts for the puckering effect associated with some red wines. The more bitter the food, the more pronounced the tannins and oak-aging in wine become. In a case of opposites attract, try pairing bitter foods such as spinach or asparagus with slightly sweet, unoaked, or crisp and dry wines such as Beaujolais (Gamay Noir) or Sauvignon Blanc.

Savoury Food Likes Weighty Wine

Savoury food isn’t code for fatty or stodgy. Savoury food is high-protein food, be it mushroom or red meat, and it likes a wine (red or white) that matches its flavour in terms of weight or body. Case in point: Beef Bourguignon. Burgundy’s premier culinary dish is the perfect match of savoury (beef, mushroom, and flour) and full-bodied, weighty Bourgogne red wine.

That doesn’t mean that savoury food can’t be fatty too. Think juicy steaks or cheese boards and big-bold reds. The tannins in the wine help break down the fats in red meats and certain hard cheeses (as opposed to salty or creamy ones), while the fat in turn helps mellow and soften the bitterness in tannic wine.

Salty Food Doesn’t Really Like Wine

Here are a couple more experiments to illustrate the problem:
Take a few granules of salt and place them on your tongue. Next, take a sip of a white wine, such as the ubiquitous Sauvignon Blanc or Italian Trebbiano. The acid from both will clash with salt and make each wine taste sourer that they would on their own.

Try the same again, this time substituting a red wine, such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet Franc, for the white wine. The tannin in both should make the Cabernets taste incredibly bitter.

So, what happens when you pair salt with wine? You get the same flavours found in pairing salt & vinegar. (In fact, each of the above grapes is used to make a different wine vinegar; Trebbiano taking pride of place in the making of Italian balsamic.)
What salt does like is a touch of sweetness and it pairs best with slightly sweet white wines and dry Italian spumante, such as Prosecco.

What About Spice?

Well, spice isn’t exactly a taste, even if it is a sensation. In terms of wine pairings, it’s of some minor importance to define whether the spicy sensation is flavour or kick. That is, it is spicy/flavoursome like cumin or spicy/hot like chilli power (in which cumin is a key ingredient)?

Both go well with very dry sparkling wines and slightly sweeter wines like Riesling and Gewürztraminer (gewürz referring to the spiciness of the Traminer grape variety).

Is that It?

For more on individual pairings, be sure to read InterWined’s weekly food & wine feature ‘Blow the Bank’.

Alternately, click Recipes to see what’s cooking.

Beyond that, everything else is lagniappe.