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How to Match Food and Wine courtesy of Matt Skinner’s Heard it Through the Grapevine..

HOW TO MATCH FOOD AND WINE by Matt Skinner – this is a great book for any novice or if you just love getting the right wine with your food.

By Ingredients

Always consider the individual ingredients, the overall dish, and how you intend to prepare it. All of this will have a huge impact on the success of your match.

“Its fantastic with fish.” How many times have you read that on a wine label? I see something like that and immediately my temperature starts to rise. Fish how? And what kind?

I might have missed out some of the crucial information, but are we now just assuming that there is only one species of fish swimming around out there, and that it all tastes much the same no matter how you cook it? Take a deep breath, Matt.

Fish, shellfish, poultry, game, meat, and cheese.- each is simply a ‘gateway’ to a more expansive and diverse range of products- each in turn with its own distinct set of aromas, flavours and textures. Add a whole variety of cooking method, accompaniments, and sauces to the mix, and you begin to realize that there’s all number of variables to consider when you’re looking for the right wine. Here are the basics to get you going…

Fish and shellfish
White wine goes great with fish, Yes,yes we all know that, although ordering or cooking seafood shouldn’t always see you revert to the same old safe options.

Sure, generally speaking, white wine is suited to all manner of things from the sea but with the exception of full-throttled reds, there are plenty of great and far more exciting options to be had.

Poultry and game birds
While it all comes with a set of wings, that’s about where the similarities between poultry and game birds begin and end.

At the end of the spectrum you have chicken, turkey, goose, and pheasant – these are the milder tasting birds and are perfectly suited to full flavoured whites. Some degree of oak will really help you here. At the other end of the spectrum, you have extreme – Duck, pigeon, squab, and grouse – intense, full flavoured birds, birds that can smell so strong they have the ability to clear a room in seconds. For this reason you need structured, earthy reds with good balance between sweet and savoury.

Pork

For most carnivores, the blood thirsty combination of meat and wine is just about as good as it gets. This is the territory where reds of all shapes and sizes come into their own, although, as always, there are one or two exceptions to keep us on our toes.

Pork is the anomaly in that it works with both full flavoured whites and similarly heavy reds – it all depends how you cook it; chargrilled pork chops with chardonnay; stuffed and rolled porchetta with cavolo nero (black kale) and Sangiovese; Chinese roasted pork belly with sparkling shiraz; sweet suckling pig with southern Italian reds such as Primitivo, Negroamaro, and Nero d’Avola; and six-hour slow-roasted shoulder of pork with salsa Verde and Grenache. The choice is yours.

Lamb and mutton

Lamb, whether pan-fried, chargrilled or slow roasted- as we’ve already discussed – shares a mouth watering bond with Carbanet Sauvignon, although this wine could easily substituted for any full flavoured red with enough depth of flavour and dry grippy tannin.

A few football seasons on and mutton, with its dense savoury edge and tougher texture, needs a wine bearing similar attributes. Look for robust sun-soaked reds full of leathery spice and earthy flavours; Temparanilli, touriga Nacional and Amarone – style wines from Spain, Portugal and Italy, respectively, will serve you well.

Veal
Moving on from old sheep to young cows, veal needs fruit sweetness and softer structure of wine styles such as Valpolicella Classico, Carmenere, or Merlot, while its older siblings demand with more. Much more.

Beef
Beef calls for heavy artillery. And considerations when looking for an appropriate wine match should include how long the meat has been hung (or aged), the amount of marbling (or fat) it contains, and how it has been prepared.

Aged meats need wine with greater intensity and richness, while younger cuts need examples not only with flavour, but structure too. If you can, be wary of heavy sauces and reductions that can really spoil the flavour of both the meat and the wine. Shiraz, Grenache, Mourvede, Zinfandel, Malbec, and Carignan will be worthy contenders, although there is certainly no shortage of great steak wines out there too.

Cheese
I love cheese for all the same reasons I love wine. Just as wine is the product of grape juice, cheese is the product of milk – every variable that can influence how a wine turns out can (and will!) also be seen in the cheese making process.

Do I think they’re good for one another? Absolutely. I get nervous just thinking about the cheese trolley making its way towards my table. Cheese is not just for dinner parties, though, and you have only to travel around Europe to see that, much as with wine, eating cheese is – almost ritualistic- part of life.

Good matches are easy to produce because you are simply combining two finished products, although there are few things to consider along the way. Consider texture – light and delicate, soft and creamy, hard and dry, heavy and intense, balancing the weight of both your wine and cheese evenly as possible is one step.

Next step is to consider flavour – generally, the more flavour you have in your cheese, the more flavour you will need in your wine. Acidity is important, too. It’s no great coincidence that high acid cheese, work beautifully with high acid wines such as young Sauvignon Blanc.

And finally, consider mould – mould in cheese can often make dry wines seem fruitless and bitter. Both sweet and fizzy wines are good options to combat this. So just take note of a few of these when heading to the supermarket with that dinner party in mind.

September 02, 2011  |  2 Comments