Pairing wine with food can be a headache for many people. Is it a science or an art? What if I make a wine and food faux pas? Should I match a meal to my wine or the wine to my meal?
These are all questions that may go through your mind if you’re planning on hosting.
There are some pitfalls and traps that can appear when pairing up good wine with good food but, thankfully, there’s some basic pointers to remember to help you guide your way to a wine and food pairing success.
In fact, it’s so easy we can teach you in just three easy steps!
Keep it simple
Too many people get into such a panic about pairings that it can end up ruining the whole dining experience. Relax! Pairing wine with food should be fun so keep it simple.
Don’t get so consumed with matching that you forget the most important thing; you should be serving food and wine that you enjoy. It’s much better to choose a wine that you enjoy and preparing a dish that you enjoy and have the balance a little off, than to be sitting eating food and drinking wine than you don’t enjoy. Makes sense, doesn’t it?
Wine and food matching isn’t typically a good time to experiment with wines you are not as familiar with. Don’t be boring or overly cautious in your selection, of course, but exercise a little caution and try to make your decision based on some knowledge of the wine.
Lockett Bros love helping our customers to find the right wines for their foods, so feel free to pop in and ask away!
Find the balance
Balance is a keyword in selecting wines for food. There should be no overpowering in the relationship. A good wine and food pairing is an equal partnership but that’s not to say you cannot choose big strong flavours. Just make sure there are big strong flavours from both.
As an example, if you were preparing a hearty lamb dish, you’d want a suitably hearty wine so a Cabernet Sauvignon would make an ideal partner.
Perhaps you’re planning on a fish dish; naturally these have more delicate subtle flavours so you want the wine to echo that, perhaps a crisp Soave.
Finding balance is really about matching weights. But what if you don’t know how to gauge weights? It’s quite simple. For food, you should look at the fat content in most cases and for wine, you should pay close attention to the alcohol content, the colour and the grapes.
At its most basic level, wine pairing would match red wine with meat and white wine with fish, but of course, the wines of the world are far more complex than that so there’s a lot more to it. It does give you a good point of reference to start at though.
Thinking rich, full-bodied food? Then your wine has to be that too. Delicate, subtle flavours in your meal? Okay, you know where we’re going with this!
Match the star wine to the star dish
Once you know your menu, you know what the main element of your menu will be and it’s critical that your wine selection plays up to this. But hey, don’t necessarily think about a whole dish as the star.
Quite often, you’ll want to match your star wine up to the sauce in your main dish. A rich, sweet thick sauce with a meat dish would more than likely cry out for a big strong red in the ilk of a Shiraz, for example.
Sometimes, you have to deconstruct your dish a little to really find the star of the show, which lets you find that star partner in your wine.
Matching wine with food is one of the real joys when hosting guests. Put these tips into practice and relax.
We at Lockett Bros would be delighted to help you find the wine star of your next dinner party. Drop in to the store and we’d love to help.
