Simone Spotlight. - Wine and Food Pairings

 

Tips on How to Pair your Food & Wine

August 29th

 
 

🎉 Hey East Bay 🎉
Today’s blog goes over the simple ways you can identify the best wine to go with your dish no matter the flavor profile.

9 Tips For Pairing Wine & Food

If you’re just getting started, you’ll find these tried-and-true methodologies to produce consistently great pairings.

  1. The wine should be more acidic than the food.

  2. The wine should be sweeter than the food.

  3. The wine should have the same flavor intensity as the food.

  4. Red wines pair best with boldly flavored meats (e.g. red meat).

  5. White wines pair best with light-intensity meats (e.g. fish or chicken).

  6. Bitter wines (e.g. red wines) are best balanced with fat.

  7. It is better to match the wine with the sauce than with the meat.

  8. More often than not, White, Sparkling, and Rosé wines create contrasting pairings.

  9. More often than not, Red wines will create congruent pairings.

Congruent Pairings vs Contrasting Pairings

A contrasting pairing creates balance by contrasting tastes and flavors. 

A congruent pairing creates balance by amplifying shared flavor compounds.

Identify The Basics Tastes

In this day and age, we’ve learned that there are over 20 different tastes found in food – from the basic, including sweet, sour, and fat, to the extreme, including spicy, umami, and electric. Fortunately, you only need to focus on 6 tastes when pairing food and wine: Salt, Acid, Sweet, Bitter, Fat, and Spice (Piquant).

Basic Taste Components in Wine

For the most part, the wine lacks the 3 tastes of fatness, spiciness, and saltiness but does contain acidity, sweetness, and bitterness in varying degrees. 

You can group wines into 3 different categories:

  1. Red wines have more bitterness.

  2. White, rosé, and sparkling wines have more acidity.

  3. Sweet wines have more sweetness.

Basic Taste Components in Food

Simplify a dish down to its basic dominant tastes. For example, baked macaroni has 2 primary components: fat and salt. Southern barbecue is a bit more complex and includes fat, salt, sweet, and spice (plus a little acid!). Even dishes without meat can be simplified. For example, a green salad offers acidity and bitterness; creamed corn offers fatness and sweetness.

Consider the Intensity

FOOD: Is the food super light or super rich? A salad may seem lighter, but perhaps the dressing is balsamic vinaigrette with high acidity. If the intensity of the dish isn’t obvious at first, just focus on the power of each taste component (acidity, fat, sweetness, etc).

WINE: Is the wine light or bold? Here are a few examples:

  • Sauvignon Blanc is light-bodied, but it has higher acidity

  • Chardonnay has more body, but it’s usually not too acidic

  • Pinot Noir is lighter-bodied (for red wine) and it doesn’t have too much tannin (bitterness).

  • Cabernet Sauvignon is more full-bodied and has high tannin (more bitterness)

Find Contrasting or Congruent Pairings

Now that you’ve identified all the basic taste components in your dish, you can start playing around with pairing options. 

Here is an example of an American classic;  baked macaroni and cheese::

COMPLEMENTARY PAIRING: A white wine with high acidity will complement the fat in the macaroni. So, for example, a traditional mac and cheese recipe with a creamy béchamel sauce matched with zesty white wine such as Pinot Grigio, Assyrtiko or Sauvignon Blanc would create a Complementary Pairing.

CONGRUENT PAIRING: A creamy white wine will add to the dish's creaminess. So, for example, a traditional mac and cheese recipe with a creamy béchamel sauce matched with a creamy white wine such as Viognier or Chardonnay would create a Congruent Pairing.

Getting Creative

Once you create balance with the major taste components in both the wine and the dish, you can get creative by pairing the more subtle flavors. Here are some examples using variants of mac and cheese:

BOLD RED WINE: The ideology behind this pairing is that the high bitterness (tannin) will be balanced out by the salt and fat in the macaroni. This balancing will leave you with the remaining subtle flavors to pair with the cheese and wine. So, for example, if your baked macaroni has smoked gouda in it, you might choose a Shiraz with smokiness (on the finish). The smoky flavors combine to create a Congruent Pairing while the tannin in the wine creates a Complementary Pairing with the fat in the dish.

SWEET WHITE WINE: The ideology behind this pairing is to bring out the sweet and salty flavors with a pairing. For example, mac and cheese with ham would match well with a zesty white wine with some sweetness like Riesling. The acidity would create a Complementary Pairing to the fat and the sweetness would act as a Congruent Pairing with the ham.