Discovering a fantastic food & wine match is one of the greatest pleasures for a wine drinker.  Most of us are vaguely aware of some of the classic combinations – Claret (Bordeaux) with Lamb, Port with Stilton, Chablis with Oysters etc.  But most of us would admit to having little knowledge as to why some of these combinations work.  The French & Italians seem to do it instinctively, there are books and websites a-plenty (and ummm, blogs!) and yet for most of us the business of deciding what to drink with our meals is very much a hit and miss affair and often down to what’s in the fridge or was on offer in the supermarket.  These days also, there is a bewildering array of cuisines that we are likely to experience in any given week and the planning that would be necessary to wine match Tex Mex on Tuesday, Wontons on Wednesday, Fish on Friday and a Provencale Picnic – well, whenever the sun shines, would be exhausting.

Of course, the only real hard and fast rule is that “anything goes” and if a robust South African Pinotage with Smoked Salmon really rocks your boat…then the FWW police won’t be out to get you for “bad taste”.   BUT, yes there is a but, if you are into food in any way more than fuel for the machine, you may want to explore the extraordinary myriad of flavours the wine world has to offer and experience the buzz you can get from discovering a great match!

There are a few sensible (gosh, I hate that word!) guidelines which can bring joy and triumph to even the most ordinary fare:

• Match the weight / richness of the food and the body of the wine – a hearty rustic beef stew will need a weighty, full bodied wine, for example and not a delicate lightly chilled red (I’m in Daube with Chateauneuf du Pape fantasy as I type, even though its 30C outside…). Think of the cooking method here too – a long slow casserole or braise will have intense, ingrained flavours which will work best with a deep flavoured wine.
• Match the flavour intensity of the food with the flavour intensity of the wine – take with a huge pinch of “sel” any back label on a bottle which advises this particular wine is “champion with chicken”! How is the chicken to be cooked? – the sauce, the accompaniments, the herbs and spices? – this “wonder wine” cannot work well with a delicate poached chicken with a creamy morel mushroom sauce AND Thai Chicken Curry!  Personally, I’d be thinking a delicate Italian Gavi with that poached Chicken and an Aussie or Alsace Riesling with my Asian dish.
• Match acidic foods with high acid wines – the way I try and put this idea across when I’m teaching Yacht Crew on this subject, is that anything you would squeeze lemon on needs a suitably high acid wine.   The classic combo (and yes, it does work if you try it!) is Sancerre (made from Sauvignon Blanc) and Goat’s Cheese: Goat’s milk is brimful of lactic acid and can taste “chalky”, swill your mouth round with a crisp, zesty Sauvignon and the cheese will taste smoother and the wine less “tart”…I can hear wedding bells!
• Match sweet foods with sweet wines – if you have ever greedily tucked into a sumptuous dessert as soon as it arrives at the table and then gone back to swig the last mouthful of your carelessly abandoned dry wine, you’ll have experienced how a dessert wine should be sweeter than the pudding it accompanies.  That last gulp of wine would have tasted almost sour after a mouthful of gateaux and then returning to the cake will leave your mouth dry until you scoff some more to take the dry wine flavour away.
• Avoid combining oily or very salty foods with high tannin red wine – I would add chilli to this list of “no no’s”: Oil & salt will make the tannic (the gum drying substance in a lot of red wines) wine taste curiously “metallic” and has the extraordinary ability to make anything flavoured with chilli taste even hotter than was intended.   Please avoid the 2005 Chateau Margaux with your Lamb Rogan Josh!!

Enough of the “do’s and don’ts” – as always with this subject matter, it is so much easier to experience it than preach it.  And so here I shamelessly mention that we do run Food & Wine Matching Masterclasses for absolutely anyone!   So in under the guidance of true gourmands (for that you can substitute the word “gluttons”!), we at FineWineWorks will show you how certain foods, cooked in certain ways, work (and sometimes don’t!) with certain foods.   We explode the myths of “Red Wine with Cheese”, tackle Salty foods with Sweet wines and how the age of a wine can be an additional factor.  If anyone has started to dribble uncontrollably whilst reading this article, please do take a peek at our website for details of our forthcoming “Cupid” evenings on 17th July and 14th August.  If you do decide to join us, I promise you won’t need to pop home for Cheese on Toast at the end of it all, and even if you do, you might want to consider a buttery, oaked Chardonnay with your washed rind Brie…….

Helen Brotherton
07.07.09