In my job working the floor at Sam's Wines & Spirits, the most frequent question asked of me—besides 'Where's the restroom?'—has
to do with pairing wine with food. Wine buyers want their dinners to work.
You can pair wine with food in different ways, while there are some matches that you want to beware do not happen.
But, in either case, it all works or not because elements in the food or wine—acidity, say, or sugar—pair well together or do not.
(Other elements include fat, salt, alcohol or tannin, that puckery experience you often get with substantial red wines.) Matching
'flavors'—sauvignon blanc with cilantro, for example—is far less important than keeping track of these elements.
Acidity:
Foods high in acidity require a wine with the same degree of acidity. For instance, the perfect match for an acidic salad dressing
is a wine high in acidity itself, something like a German riesling or a well-made pinot grigio from northern Italy. You'd be surprised
how both the dressing and the wine tame each other down, one acidity, as it were, canceling down the other.
Contrariwise, wines low in acidity (many an American or Australian chardonnay, for example) get washed away when paired with
foods high in acid—citrus salsas, say, or tomatoes or sauces made with lemon juice, capers or vinegar.
Salt:
Foods high in salt require either a high acid wine or a wine with marked sweetness. That's why oysters and Chablis work, or
olives and fino sherry. Or, that's why salty blue cheese paired with a sweet dessert wine is so ethereal.
Sweet:
It's really amazing how much sugar we eat, even while we think that we are not. Many prepared foods contain sweeteners (look
for ingredients that end in –ose) and contemporary food preparations are replete with sweet things (tropical fruit salsas; balsamic
reductions; meats stewed with dried fruits).
Sweetness in food requires the same level of sweetness in wine. That's always made sense with desserts—pairing an apple tart
with a medium-sweet wine, for example—but it also holds for main courses.
Off-dry white wines (again, many an American or Australian chardonnay; some albarinos from Spain; German rieslings, just to
give three examples) really pair well with sweetness in food.
Also, sweetness in wine can tame the fire of spicy foods.
Fat:
Tannin and fat are made for each other. An astringent cabernet really works well with that strip of fat that wraps a good steak. (In
addition, cooking the steak medium rare or rare is a good idea because the blood proteins also tame tannin.)
Like sugar, fat is ubiquitous in modern eating, from cheeses to meats to deep-fried food. Hit it with tannin. (On the other hand, be
careful because tannin aggravates the flavor of salt. If serving a tannic wine, don't oversalt the food.)
Alcohol:
Wines high in alcohol also aggravate salty flavors (they make salt saltier). Also, high-alcohol wines overwhelm delicate or finely
etched flavors in food. Many a sauce, deftly made, is wiped off the palate by a wine high in alcohol.
That said, remember that, like sugar and fat, high alcohol content is very common at the table. California zinfandels, for example,
routinely weigh in at 14-15 percent alcohol (average alcohol for wine is 11-12 percent).
In short, the kinds of wines that work best in most situations are low in alcohol, high in acidity, and often off-dry.
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