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The first thing to
remember about matching food and wine is to forget the rules. Forget
about shoulds and shouldn'ts. Forget about complicated systems for
selecting the right wine to enhance the food on the table. This is
not rocket science. It's common sense. Follow your instincts.
Just choose a wine
that you want to drink by itself. Despite all the hoopla about
matching wine and food, you will probably drink most of the wine
without the benefit of food--either before the food is served or
after you've finished your meal. Therefore, you will not go too far
wrong if you make sure the food is good and the wine is, too. Even
if the match is not perfect, you will still enjoy what you're
drinking.
Some of today's
food-and-wine pontificators suggest that mediocre wines can be
improved by serving them with the right food. The flaw in that
reasoning, however, is the scenario described above. If the match
does not quite work as well as you hope, you're stuck with a
mediocre wine. So don't try to get too fancy. First pick a good
wine.
This is where
common sense comes in. The old rule about white wine with fish and
red wine with meat made perfect sense in the days when white wines
were light and fruity and red wines were tannic and weighty. But
today, when most California Chardonnays are heavier and
fuller-bodied than most California Pinot Noirs and even some
Cabernets, color coding does not always work.
Red wines as a
category are distinct from whites in two main ways: tannins--many
red wines have them, few white wines do--and flavors. White and red
wines share many common flavors; both can be spicy, buttery,
leathery, earthy or floral. But the apple, pear and citrus flavors
in many white wines seldom show up in reds, and the currant, cherry
and stone fruit flavors of red grapes usually do not appear in
whites.
In the
wine-and-food matching game, these flavor differences come under the
heading of subtleties. You can make better wine choices by focusing
on a wine's size and weight. Like human beings, wines come in all
dimensions. To match them with food, it's useful to know where they
fit in a spectrum, with the lightest wines at one end and
fuller-bodied wines toward the other end.
A Spectrum of Wines
To help put the
world of wines into perspective, we offer the following lists, which
arrange many of the most commonly encountered wines into a hierarchy
based on size, from lightest to weightiest. If you balance the wine
with the food by choosing one that will seem about the same weight
as the food, you raise the odds dramatically that the match will
succeed.
Yes, purists, some
Champagnes are more delicate than some Rieslings and some Sauvignon
Blancs are bigger than some Chardonnays, but we're trying to paint
with broad strokes here. When you're searching for a light wine to
go with dinner, pick one from the top end of the list. When you want
a bigger wine, look toward the end.
Selected dry and off-dry white
wines, lightest to weightiest:
Soave, Orvieto, Pinot Grigio
Off-dry Riesling
Dry Riesling
Muscadet
Champagne and other dry sparkling wines
Chenin Blanc
French Chablis and other unoaked Chardonnays
Sauvignon Blanc
White Bordeaux
White Burgundy
Pinot Gris (Alsace, Tokay)
Gewürztraminer
Barrel-fermented or barrel-aged Chardonnay (United States,
Australia)
Selected red wines, lightest to weightiest:
Valpolicella
Beaujolais
Dolcetto
Rioja
California Pinot Noir
Burgundy
Barbera
Chianti Classico
Barbaresco
Barolo
Bordeaux
Merlot (United States)
Zinfandel
Cabernet Sauvignon (United States, Australia)
Rhône, Syrah, Shiraz
More common sense:
Hearty food needs a hearty wine, because it will make a lighter wine
taste insipid. With lighter food, you have more leeway. Lighter
wines will balance nicely, of course, but heartier wines will still
show you all they have. Purists may complain that full-bodied wines
"overwhelm" less hearty foods, but the truth is that anything but
the blandest food still tastes fine after a sip of a heavyweight
wine.
These are the
secrets behind some of the classic wine-and-food matches. Muscadet
washes down a plate of oysters because it's just weighty enough to
match the delicacy of a raw bivalve. Cabernet complements lamb chops
or roast lamb because they're equally vigorous. Pinot Noir or
Burgundy makes a better match with roast beef because the richness
of texture is the same in both.
To make your own
classic matches, start off on the traditional paths and then deviate
a little. Try a dry Champagne or a dry Riesling, which are on either
side of Muscadet on our weight list, for a similar effect. Don't get
stuck on Cabernet with lamb. Look up and down the list and try
Zinfandel or Côtes-du-Rhône. Instead of Burgundy or Pinot Noir with
roast beef, try a little St.-Emilion or Barbera. That's the way to
put a little variety into your wine life without straying too far
from the original purpose.
At this point, let
us interject a few words about sweetness. Some wine drinkers recoil
at the thought of drinking an off-dry wine with dinner, insisting
that any hint of sweetness in a wine destroys its ability to
complement food. In practice, nothing can be further from the truth.
How many Americans drink sweetened iced tea with dinner? Lemonade?
Or sugary soft drinks? Why should wine be different? The secret is
balance. So long as a wine balances its sugar with enough natural
acidity, a match can work. This opens plenty of avenues for fans of
German Rieslings, Vouvrays and white Zinfandel.
One of the classic
wine-and-food matches is Sauternes, a sweet dessert wine, with foie
gras--which blows the sugarphobes' theory completely. The match
works because the wine builds richness upon richness. The moral of
the story is not to let some arbitrary rules spoil your fun. If you
like a wine, drink it with food you enjoy and you're bound to be
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