Wine Currents
December 2004

WINE CURRENTS WITH THE CIA

FOOD & WINE PAIRING

Matching food and wine to each other to enhance the quality of a meal can be both simple and difficult. The simple part is this: if you bear in mind a few basic guidelines and enjoy a moderate degree of gastronomic exploration and experimentation, you cannot go too far wrong. The difficult part is this: there is no “perfect” food and wine combination that is right for everybody, but we are often called upon to come up with this elusive, even impossible combination. Bear in mind that wine, like food, is composed of various flavors and textures and should be matched with the other elements of a meal based on those flavors and textures; it’s as simple – and complex – as that. And, somewhere between the two extremes – the casual, spontaneous approach and the rigorous, classical approach – most people, especially food and wine lovers and professionals, find their own comfort zone.

Texture

Foods and wine both have textures, which we can loosely define as how they feel – on their own and together – in the mouth. This “mouth feel” is highly subjective and is largely based on cultural and culinary experience, but we can all agree that certain foods and wines seem richer or fattier in the mouth, while others feel far more austere, or lean.

In the food and wine pairing process, you must consider the texture of the food you want to marry to the wine, along with the texture of the wine to the food. In fact, one of the simplest but most important guidelines for matching food and wine is to marry “power with power”; light-tasting and light-textured dishes with lighter wines, heavier dishes with fuller-bodied dishes.

Cooking Methods

When matching food and wine, cooking method is of paramount importance. Would you serve the same wine with a poached salmon, whose proteins and sugars are released into its cooking liquid, as you would for a grilled salmon served rare, whose sugars have caramelized and whose proteins are largely uncoagulated?

The poached salmon, with its mild flavor profile, calls for a light- to medium bodied dry white wine. The grilled salmon, served rare, needs a more intense, more powerful wine: a full-bodied elegant white or a light-to medium-bodied, fruit-driven red.

Flavor Intensity = Wine Intensity

As food flavor intensifies, so should the flavors in the accompanying wine. To put in another way, one important guideline in pairing food and wine is that you will most often achieve a match by balancing equivalent levels of flavor intensity in both the food and the wine. Food that is (in rough order of flavor intensity provided by the cooking method) poached, steamed, sautéed, stir-fried, pan-fried, deep-fried, braised, roasted, broiled, grilled, or blackened might respectively be matched to white wines based on (again, in rough order of intensity) Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer, Chardonnay, and Viognier, and red wines based on Gamay, Barbera, Pinot Noir, Dolcetto, Sangiovese, Merlot, Zinfandel, Nebbiolo, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Syrah, among a host of other varietals.

The idea is to match the flavor intensity of the dominant ingredient or dominant flavor of a dish with the flavor intensity of the wine. We urge you to create your own imaginative menus pairing food and wine, remember, experiment and have fun . . . here’s to happy marriages!