How-To: Pair Sweet Wines with Dinner

Sweet wines may be the go-to drink for dessert, or for casual sipping for some people. But they can be a good addition to some meals as well.

The most obvious may be the pairing we talk about fairly regularly: sweet Riesling with spicy food. The thick fruit flavors of a Riesling can calm all but the most severely spicy dish.

Floral, aromatic whites like Gewuztraminer can have sweet flavors. They tend to be lighter wines, but they work well when paired with herbal dishes.

Red wines can pick up the flavor of sweet berries and red fruit. A sublty sweet Pinot Noir can work well with a pork dish. A brighter, more delicate red wine like a Rioja can work well with a cheesey dish.

And the truly sweet wines, like an Ice Wine or Sauternes are typically best as a dessert as they will overwhelm most flavors, but they can work with anything that has enormous funky flavors of its own, basically anything that includes blue cheese.

How-To: Pair Wine and Clams

Shellfish like clams and oysters can be tough for some people to deal with. But for those of us who enjoy them, wine is a classic pairing.

On their own, clams have a sweet and salty flavor. Crisp wines are vital to work with that saltiness. Of course, even steamed clams usually come with some extra flavors of spices like garlic or herbs.

-Crisp and grassy Sauvignon Blanc will work well with some more herbal flavors of Clams Provencial
-Aggressive Verdello will work well with clams with garlic
-Creamy oaked Chardonnay will complement clams in a butter sauce

Pairing Wine and Pizza

We drink a lot of wine with pizza. Maybe most people crack open a beer, or down some soda, but for us on a Friday night, there is nothing like a hot slice with a nice glass of red wine. It's the perfect way to end a long week.

Picking the right wine for pizza is fairly straight forward. Just so long as you aren't dealing with a "White" pizza, the tomato sauce is going to be a defining flavor. You need a red wine, with some sweetness to complement the sweet acidity of the tomato. Then you need to pick the perfect red wine based on your other toppings. Most pizzas come with cured meats: sausage, pepperoni, or other most exotic options. This means saltiness, earthiness and maybe a hint of spice to the meat, which gives you some options with similar flavors in the wine.

• Chianti will have that hint of spice and dark fruit suited for some of the spicier cured meats.
• Zinfandel can offer some spice and red fruit for meatier options like sausage.
• Pinot Noir can offer some sweet red fruit and earthiness to complement lighter cured meats.

If you are looking at veggies on your pizza though, it gets a lot harder. You might want to play around with white wine. Stick to Italy: a Pinot Grigio might be your best bet.

How-To: Pair Wine with Indian Food Take-Out

Indian food is one of those cuisines that doesn't really have any history of pairing with wine. It wasn't a native drink in India, and the English tended to stick to their gin & tonic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't enjoy Indian food with a glass of wine today. Why not? When both are so accessible now.

Of course, as a country of 1.2 billion people, "Indian Food" is more of a varied topic. But most American versions fall under the slightly less broad category of "Northern Indian" cuisine, with things like Tandoori, Naan, and paneer coming from this region that captures a wide range of global influence due to the spice trade. The food tends to be full of spices, but decidedly less spicy than "Southern Indian" cuisine. At least in comparison to Western dishes.

Take-out Indian food tends to rely heavily on stewed sauces for their complicated flavors. Tomato-based sauces can benefit from red wines with a hint of sweet fruit, like a Pinot Noir or Merlot. Cream-based sauces can use a crisp white, like Chenin Blanc to counteract their fatty richness. This works for more mild-spiced dishes.

You must remember the heat level, though, Some heat in a dish can be matched by a wine with it's own white pepper notes, like a Malbec. But the stronger heat of a Vindaloo needs something to cool it down, like a thick, sweet Riesling.

Finally, most casual Indian food in the United States tends to focus on ingredients Westerners can recognize,  the main protein or vegetable, which you can try to match your wine against. Pork isn't too common, and beef is basically right out, but you'll see plenty of chicken, mixed vegetables, fish, and even lamb.

As you can see, like all major cuisines, there is enough diversity of choice in Indian food that allows for just as much diversity in your wine selection to match it. Good luck!

Wine With Caribbean Food

Friday nights are our casual nights: dinner ordered in, a fun movie, and a bottle of wine.  In our neighborhood, the trick is finding a wine to go with Caribbean food. We always get a great meal, but the Caribbean lacks the wine culture to match. With hearty meat or seafood dishes with a heavy influence of Indian spices, this unique food is hard to match to wine.

We do eat a lot of Indian food on our Friday nights at home, and we feel like we have found good pairings to match. Most of those dishes seem to rely on their spices, rather than the protein, for flavor (whether fish, goat, or chick peas). We usually pick a rich white wine to counteract the heat between bites. In contrast, the Caribbean food we have tried seems to use a lot of those same spices, but with a heavier hand on the meat: resulting in a much more earthier palate while retaining the spice. A white wine can get lost when matched with goat or ox-tails, so we have been seeking a red wine that can match the full flavors yet deal with the spice.

Pinot Noir seems to be pretty versatile among red wines. It's lighter and fruitier than many other varietals and can still bring some other interesting flavors. Most red meats can benefit from a little bit of sweet fruit flavors, but many Pinot's have an earthiness that matches the iron rich protein. With curried goat, you are looking at a lot of savory, even gamey flavors that need that bit of earthiness from a red wine, so we pulled down a bottle of Outer Limits Pinot Noir. We've never had a Chilean Pinot Noir, but it did what we expected, bringing a balance of sweet flavors to the spicy and savory curry. With rich side dishes like creamed spinach and macaroni pie, the wine helped round out the greasy mouth-feel left from the fat in the food.

We like to use a nice bottle of wine to transform a casual night in on Friday into a special evening. Finding the right wine for take-out food isn't always intuitive, but it's fun to keep searching for the perfect match.

How-To: Pair Wine and Different Types of BBQ

Its that time of year again. Time to fire up the grill and cook some meat. While most people think you should stick to beer with BBQ, don't discount a nice glass of wine. Of course, what wine you pick is all dependent on what style of BBQ you are going for.

North Carolina: Whole hog smoked over wood coals with a light sauce of vinegar and pepper.
  Flavor  Profile: Smoke, Fat, Spice 
  Pair With: Look for something with a bit of a bite of its own, like Lemberger

South Carolina: Whole hog smoked over wood coals with a strong mustard sauce
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat, Spice, Earthy
  Pair With: Bigger Italian reds, like Chianti Classico with a mix of fruit and darker flavors

Tennessee: Pork ribs, usually dry rubbed, but sometimes with a tomato and vinegar sauce
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat, Acid
  Pair With: Some bigger, bolder flavors Zinfandel

Kansas City: The meat varies, but its usually smothered in a tomato and molasses sauce
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat, Fruit, Acid, Sweet
  Pair With: Something with a sweet edge, like a Pinot Noir

Central Texas: Beef Brisket and pork ribs smoked over wood coals, with nothing more than salt and pepper.
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat
  Pair With: The classic of a big Cabernet Sauvignon with the traditional meat flavors

East Texas: Smoked pork shoulder and beef brisket, with a light tomato sauce
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat, Spice, Fruit, Acid
  Pair With: The rounder flavors of Merlot

Outside the US, the traditions are a bit different:
Korean: More grilling than traditional BBQ, this style tends to use meats marinated in a sauce of soy sauce, sugar, oil, garlic and pepper.
  Flavor Profile: Fat, Spice, Salty
  Pair With: a surprising range of whites, like Sauvignon Blanc

"Mongolian": Invented in Taiwan, this is a style of cooking a collection of meats and other ingredients with varying sauces on a grill.
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat
  Pair With: almost anything, depending on the other ingredients you pick

Asado or Churrasco: The South American style of grilling piles of meat, carefully stacked so dripping fats work to keep the less fatty meats and offal moist. 
  Flavor Profile: Smoke, Fat
  Pair With: the big spicy flavors of Argentine Malbec

How-To: Pair a Wine with Multiple Courses

A good way to save a bit of money at restaurants is to buy your wine by the bottle. The price is still marked up higher than if you bought the bottle at a wine store, but significantly less than if you bought as much wine by the glass. The downside with this approach is that its tough to find a wine that will pair well with multiple courses, including dishes for several people.There are a few things to keep in mind if you are going to try:

• Plan ahead: If you are selecting wines by the glass, you have time to choose while you select your dinner options. But it's difficult to pick a bottle if you have no idea what your entree will be.
• Keep the food similar: It's tough to find any wine that will pair with both fish and beef.
• Ask for recommendations: The restaurant may have wines specially selected to be served with multiple courses.
• Keep the wine flexible: Avoid wines that are too light, too big, or that have simple flavors that need specific foods to bring out their best points. Flexible wines like Pinot Noir, Merlot, Semi-Dry Riesling, or Pinot Grigio can help you with a range of food choices.
• Find something everyone enjoys: You might have to bow to the pickiest drinker at your table. Some people are just certain they don't like a certain type of wine or always and only drink another type. That's OK. Maybe this time you acquiesce, but your next dinner out, you push the envelope a little.

What does this look like in reality? Tina often chooses a delicate starter and then a heavier entree, or, vegetables at first and then meat to finish. She'll often select a light Pinot Noir, or, when feeling gutsy, a very rich, buttery chardonnay. She finds both quite flexible for this sort of pairing.

Last of the Winter Reds

Winter is finally behind us. It's time to clear some of those big red wines from the rack, before the weather gets too warm to enjoy them.

 Normally, you might pair a red wine with a meat-heavy dish. But we like to mix it up every once in a while, and try red wine with a vegetarian meal, which would traditionally be matched with white wine. With the right preparation, those delicate vegetarian flavors can be coaxed into something deeper that can stand up to a red wine.

Carrots roasted with the spice Garam Masal and a bit of nutmeg, and then pureed with jalapeno peppers. The sweet and earthy carrots pick up a smoky flavor from being roasted with the Garam Masal. The jalapeno adds green vegetable flavors, and of course some heat. Complemented with some drop biscuits stuffed with shredded radish, kohlrabi and lettuce, you are looking at a very green meal, but stuffed full of spicy and earthy flavors. Perfect for a cool spring night to ward off the last winter chill. And perfect for a big spicy red like Syrah.

Pair like with like. That's a useful rule of thumb for pairing wine with food. In this case, the spicy flavors need something to either match them, to make them really pop on the palate, or something sweet and unctuous to help soothe your mouth between bites. The earthy, smokey flavors can easily overpower most wines, so you need a real full-bodied wine to match. Malbec or an Old Vine Zinfandel might have worked, but we went with Syrah. In this case, it might have been a bit too much spice, as both the food and the wine were a mouthful on their own, and created fireworks of blossoming heat when combined. But like a plate of spicy chicken wings, sometimes that's just what you crave to help remind you that the warmth is just around the corner. 

How-To: Pair Wine with Dessert

While food and wine pairings can be tricky, nothing is quite so difficult as the dessert course. Desserts tend towards big flavors and lots of sweetness that can ruin the palate for the more delicate flavors of many wines, and some heavier red wines have savory flavors that might clash with dessert. But you do have some options.

White Wine: Most light white wines will be overpowered by the sweetness of dessert. But some buttery, citrusy Chardonnays might hold up to more delicate vanilla dishes. And a sweet Riesling can match many sweeter fruit desserts.

Red Wine: With big cherry flavors, some Pinot Noirs might work with red fruit desserts. Chocolate with heavier, earthier reds, like a strong Bordeaux, might work. Cheese with heavy fruity or funky wines like a big Barolo or and old vine Zinfandel can be fun as well.

Sparkling Wine: Despite the fact that they are usually a lighter body, sparkling wines can work well for dessert. The bubbles help cleanse the palate between bites, keeping even the heaviest dessert from becoming too cloyingly sweet.

Port: Chocolate and port wine is a classic pairing, with the strong nutty flavors of the fortified wine being an obvious choice for chocolate.

Ice Wine: For big flavored sweets, nothing quite compares to the rich sweet fruit flavors of an Ice Wine.

Noble Rot Wines: Cheese plates may not be a traditional dessert, but we love them. And nothing works quite so well with a plate of sweet, fatty, funky cheese like a glass of sweet, funky and fruity Sauternes.

Late Harvest Wines: These wines are pulled off the vine at the end of harvest. The extra time of the vine makes them much sweeter, and they pair well with that same cheese plate mentioned above.

How-To: Pair Wine and Brussel Sprouts

When thinking about a nice meal with a glass of wine, brussel sprouts aren't the first food to spring to mind. They're not everyone's favorite vegetable, but when prepared correctly, you can avoid that stereotypical whiff of sulfur. Still, no matter how the dish is prepared, you can always taste the brussels sprouts. Earthy, but sweeter than cabbage or broccoli, with just a hint of that funk: they are a great vessel for other flavors. Many people just simply roast them with a bit of olive oil or butter, maybe adding some balsamic vinegar, or...that favorite ingredient to fix a dish--bacon!

If you're looking for a wine to pair with brussels sprouts, look for a big wine, with some of those similar flavors: Earthy, funky, maybe a bit of sweetness.

• Classic Cotes du Rhone, with big flavors of herbs and spices
• Australian Shiraz (the same grape as the Cotes du Rhone) will give you just as big, but rounder, fruitier flavors.
• Italian Barolo will have some interesting earthy flavors, but might be even bigger flavors than the brussel sprouts
• Stone-y white wines like Chenin Blanc or some dry Rieslings can match the mineral flavors.

Best of 2013: Readers Favorite Adventures

Over the past year, we have had some great adventures that we have shared with you. Of course, one of your favorite stories is an old one, a great evening we enjoyed at Beecher's Handmade Cheese in Manhattan. Maybe because it really emphasized what we love about wine; enhancing a great evening, even a casual one. Or maybe its just because cheese makes everything better.

On the other hand, enjoying a casual glass of wine at home seems a popular topic, with our story on pairing Chardonnay with takeout Sushi, and pairing wine with fried chicken piquing your interest. We love reminding everyone that wine isn't just for an exquisitely crafted three course meal. A good glass of wine can make even take-out dinner or greasy fried food something a little special.

And of course, everyone likes to see others fail. We tried our best to see if we could guess the difference between a Reserve and regular Chardonnay, and you got to see why we made the assumptions we did, and how they were wrong. It's good to be reminded that there is always more to learn about wine.

Here is to sharing some more great adventures with you in 2014!

 

Wine and Thanksgiving Leftovers

Thanksgiving dinner leaves most of us with a lot of leftovers. Turkey, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole--but seldom any wine. The wine you carefully selected to accompany your holiday meal is long gone before you have grown weary of your food. So in the days following, it's a struggle to find ways to repurpose those leftovers. Just because you're re-purposing doesn't mean you shouldn't find a good bottle of wine to go along with them.

For us, we decided to re-purpose some of our leftovers in a soup: turkey, pumpkin, and turnips, with a bit of cheddar cheese and sage. It was served up in a freshly baked bread bowl flavored with coffee, molasses, star anise, and orange rind. Big, crazy flavors, thankfully far removed from yet another day of leftover Thanksgiving flavors. Definitely not suited to a delicate, fruity red wine. Instead, we looked for something with some big fruit flavors, hopefully with some spices of its own.

Of course, right now our wine rack is full of Italian wines, in an attempt to learn a bit about some unfamiliar wines, so it was a tough choice. We picked a bottle of Lagrein from the Alto Adage region because we've had a few glasses of Lagrein before and thought it might give us what we wanted. In this case, it didn't work out as well as we had hoped. The wine had the flavors we were looking for, but since we didn't know enough about the wine, we didn't give it time to breathe, and it was a bit too "tight" on its flavors. There were hints there of what we wanted, but the wine wasn't "big" enough to let us really get all of the flavors when compared to the exuberant flavors of the dinner.

Sushi and Chardonnay

Opening two bottles of Chardonnay for testing purposes, we had to find something good to eat with them before they lost their wonderful delicate flavors. With a balance of richness and crispness, Chardonnay seems like the perfect choice for Sushi.

Of course, it all depends on the style you prefer, but the raw fish in sushi will likely have a certain rich, silkiness that will match the richness of a Chardonnay, while the acidity of the wine with cleanse the palette with each sip, freeing the taste buds for the next bite.

The pairing with Castello di Amorosa's 2011 Chardonnays worked out well. With the bright, acidic Reserve Chardonnay, the wine was mellowed out by the fattiness of the Tuna, but brought a lot of liveliness to the meal. The more oaky "regular" Chardonnay brought a smoky flavor that paired well with the seaweed wrap of the sushi roll, and was a little more balanced with the food. Thankfully, with two bottles, there was more than enough to satisfactorily test our theory.

Why Red Wine with Red Meat?

While there are no hard and fast rules for pairing wine with food, there are some recommendations that make a lot of sense. When talking about pairing red meat with wine, the suggestion is almost always that you select a red. Why? Because many of the flavors found in red wines are natural compliments to red meat.

• Spice: Black pepper is an almost mandatory seasoning for a nice cut of meat, so a spicy red wine, like a Shiraz, will help add to that.
• Smokiness: For a grilled or barbecued piece of meat, there will be strong smoke flavors enhancing the meat, which can be mimicked with smokiness picked up from the wood barrels in some red wines. Almost every red wine is aged in wood barrels.
• Red Fruit: Some meat dishes are served with a sauce of red fruit, like cherries, to add a bit of sweetness. These same flavors can come from a red wine, like Pinot Noir or Zinfandel.

How-To: Pair Wine with Spices

When talking about pairing wines with a meal, we usually focus on the main ingredient. But sometimes you can consider pairing your meal based on the spices that have been used to prepare it.

• A hearty, sweet or semi-sweet Riesling can soothe the tongue when you have an exceptionally hot (spicy) dish.
• Many Italian red wines have herbal notes that will match the classical Italian cooking herbs.
• The peppery notes in Shiraz and Malbec will perfectly match meats that have been seasoned simply, with salt and pepper. (but, let's hope you never find a wine that has "salt" as a descriptor!)
• Crisp, fruity and floral whites like Gewurztraminer, Viognier, and Sauvignon Blanc go well with the complicated layers of spice in many Eastern (think Thai) dishes.
• A nice port or late-harvest wine would go well with "dessert" spices like cinnamon and nutmeg.

Confusion at CraftBar

Even with everything we have learned about wine in the last few years, we still make mistakes. While it's almost impossible to pick a "bad" wine at a nicer restaurant, it is possible to make an uninformed choice, resulting in a wine poorly matched to your meal. Your evening won't be ruined, but it might reduce your overall enjoyment of what could have been a great meal.

Conveniently located off Union Square, just a few short subway stops from our New York City home, we've managed to stop in at CraftBar several times to enjoy their wine. With a seasonal menu full of fresh ingredients and an extensive and interesting wine menu, it was only a matter of time before we sat down for dinner, too.

Looking over the menus, I though I had it all figured out. The cod stood out to me, so despite the cooler day, I chose a white wine to go with it. I picked a Chardonnay, hoping for a balance of crispness and richness. Rule of thumb: white wine with fish, always. Right? With the fish, that held true. But, the cod was accompanied by an earthy cassoulet of sausage and beans that really proved to be the main flavor of the meal. I realized right away that the meal would have been better paired with a red wine.

This incident served to remind us of the importance of proper pairings. We always feel that good quality food and good quality wine make for a better meal, and that one shouldn't hold too much stock in getting the "right" wine. The truth is, though, that if the two don't work well together, you lose something in the result. It's disappointing when an expensive glass of wine becomes overpowered by that steak you ordered, or the sweet dessert wine obliterates the flavors of the delicate mousse you've picked for dessert.

So, if you're not sure what the menu means, say, by "cassoulet" (the situation in my case), ask your server to explain and to even give you a wine recommendation. It's okay to admit you don't know, and it's certainly better to ask if it means you will be assured of enjoying your meal that much more. You want the ultimate experience, especially if you're paying top price for it. We look forward to our next pairing opportunity at CraftBar, for sure.

How-To: Pair Wine With Grilled Meat?

It's impossible to pin it down, since there is a wide range of flavors within styles and regions of any varietal, and a range of recipes you can use for your grilled meat, but you can use a basic guideline to help you make some decisions when trying to pair a wine with grilled meats.

Special Days, Special Wine

A special day calls for a special wine. This year we finally had a reason to celebrate Mother's Day at home, instead of with a mailed gift and phone call. Looking over our options, we pulled out a bottle of Prestige Cuvee Brut from California's V. Sattui winery. We've enjoyed a few other bottles from them, so it seemed like the perfect option for the big day.

Big, dry and creamy, the wine was a mouthful all on its own, but I made our new momma a special meal to go along with the wine. When we go out for dinner, we may well order complicated dishes, but at home, we often stick to classic American comfort food, and Tina's favorite is Mac & Cheese. Rich and sweet, with the earthiness of the cheese augmented with the addition of some mushrooms, it might have been a bit too powerful of a dish for the wine, but the wine had its own sweet creaminess that brought those aspects of  the meal to the forefront.

It might not have been a traditional pairing, but sometimes its nice to break all the rules and just go with what you want for a special celebration. The wine got a bit lost with dinner, but it certainly didn't ruin the meal, and that just meant we had an excuse to enjoy another glass afterwards, to truly savor the wine.

Pairing Wine with Brussel Sprout Curry

Pairing wine with food is mostly about history. Finding a wine to pair with a meat or fish is fairly easy, with the long traditions of wine and food in France and Italy. With other dishes, it can be a bit harder.

With a tofu dish, especially one with a curry sauce, there isn't the same depth of history to draw from, so you have to be a little more creative in your wine pairing. Tofu has little flavor of its own, while curry is a strong flavor tough to match with wine. In deciding to pair a tofu and vegetable curry, we looked to the most powerful flavor among the vegetables to find our match for the wine: brussel sprouts seemed the biggest flavor in the dish, providing earth, green vegetable, and a bit of funk.

Still not an easy match, but our thought was to search for a white wine. We decided to look for something with a bit of crispness to it to counter the richness of the tofu and curry. The earth and funk can be emphasized by a bit of minerality. With that in mind, we picked a Chenin Blanc. The younger versions from the Loire Valley can be bright, with a sharp, almost metallic edge. The pairing was pretty decent.

How-To: Pair Red Wine and Fish

If you were to ask most wine professionals what red wine to pair with fish, they would most likely tell you to stick to white wine. But the opinion around here is that that you should always feel free to enjoy wine your way.

The heavy tannins, bright berry flavors, or deep earthiness of some red wines can be too much for most fish, but there is still a lot of options that might work well, depending on the nature of the fish. Rich, fatty fishes can stand up to a bit of flavor, and can be complemented by a bit of spice or tannins. A fish dish with a tomato sauce can handle a bit of fruitiness. In either case, it may make the most sense to stick to lighter red wines, like Pinot Noir from France or Washington State, or an Italian Chianti.