Wine + Food = Great
Be the Hostess with the Mostess
Planning a formal dinner party or casual get-together isn’t nearly as hard as you may think. Don’t worry about obeying any hard and fast laws of food and wine compatibility: just learn a little something about the nature of each wine variety and keep one simple guideline in mind: Match the wine with the sauce, or with the dominant flavor of the dish. Here’s a simple example: If your chicken recipe uses a lemony/buttery/creamy sauce, serve white wine. If it’s a cacciatore or parmesan with robust tomato sauce, serve red wine, because in either case, what you taste most is the sauce and not the chicken.
Ditto the whole “white wine with fish” thing. If the fish is a delicate stuffed sole or scallop, white wine would be great. But if you’re doing salmon with a hoisin glaze, pinot noir will be a big hit. You can skip all the educational stuff and use the links below to jump right to the food items you plan to serve. But you may want a little information about what makes certain wines the best match for certain foods.
Fish Issues:
Ever wondered why people say, ”
Planning a formal dinner party or casual get-together isn’t nearly as hard as you may think. Don’t worry about obeying any hard and fast laws of food and wine compatibility: just learn a little something about the nature of each wine variety and keep one simple guideline in mind: Match the wine with the sauce, or with the dominant flavor of the dish. Here’s a simple example: If your chicken recipe uses a lemony/buttery/creamy sauce, serve white wine. If it’s a cacciatore or parmesan with robust tomato sauce, serve red wine, because in either case, what you taste most is the sauce and not the chicken.
Ditto the whole “white wine with fish” thing. If the fish is a delicate stuffed sole or scallop, white wine would be great. But if you’re doing salmon with a hoisin glaze, pinot noir will be a big hit. You can skip all the educational stuff and use the links below to jump right to the food items you plan to serve. But you may want a little information about what makes certain wines the best match for certain foods.
Ever wondered why everyone says, “Red wine with meat, white wine with fish?” Red wines have a substance in their skins and seeds called tannins, which give a wine age-ability but also impart that drying, “bitter” component to reds. Tannin also clashes terribly with fish and seafood: it brings out that nasty metallic, “fishy” taste. Fish is also traditionally prepared with lemony/buttery/creamy sauces whose relatively delicate flavors are overpowered by most red wines. So white wine was considered the safe choice until recently. A hot new trend is to serve salmon with pinot noir, and it works beautifully. The salmon has a more robust flavor than other fish, and it’s often prepared with ingredients such
Wine on the Hoof:
That tannin we just mentioned may wreck havoc with fish, but with red meat it’s the match made in heaven. The fat in red meat tones down the dry sensation, while the tannin gives enough structure to stand up to the this heavy protein. Of all the red grapes, cabernet sauvignon contains the most tannin, so that makes a big grilled steak and glass of California cab a food/wine pairing to die for.
Sweets for the Sweet:
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