Refrigerate white or sparkling wines just before you are ready to enjoy them. Wines left sitting in cold storage for more than a few days will taste noticeably duller than wines that have been just chilled; this is especially true of sparkling wines. If necessary, pull the wine out of the fridge and let it come back to room temperature before chilling it down again.
Red wines present themselves best when served at a cool cellar temperature, not room temperature. Served warm, red wines show poorly, with the fruit understated and the tannins and alcohol screaming. In fact, slight chilling (to between 53 and 57 degrees) works wonders for red wines with high concentrations of fruit and lower levels of tannins—wines like Pinot Noir, fruit forward Merlot, some Sangioveses, and even a soft, juicy Cabernet Sauvignon. The ideal serving temperature varies with the weight and structure of the wine. If a full-bodied wine is served too cold, the tannins will accentuate the wine's bitterness, so more classic reds (like Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, and Syrah), ample in tannins, are best enjoyed between 56 and 65 degrees. Lighter- to medium-bodied wines should be served at the cooler end of the scale.
CHOOSING WINES FOR LONG-TERM STORAGE
There's a wine adage that states that thirty minutes in the glass is worth six months in the bottle. So if a wine continues to improve as it sits in your glass, chances are it's worth cellaring. If it tastes still better a few hours later, you can safely invest in several bottles and forget about them in your cellar for a few years.
A word about decanting, or the process of pouring wine from the bottle into a larger, carafe-like vessel. We decant wines for one of two primary reasons:
• To leave behind the sedimentary deposit that builds up in most full-bodied red wines after five to eight years. If you are decanting for this reason, do so in front of a light source, such as a candle or small flashlight. As you pour the wine from the bottle into the decanter or carafe, stop pouring when the sediment begins to be visible at the neck of the bottle.
• To aerate a young wine. This is the more frequent rationale for decanting red wines, and it can enhance your enjoyment of any young, full-flavored red (or even white) wine. In this case a rough decanting (no worries about sediment), just glugging it into a carafe, suffices.
If decanting makes sense for the wine you are serving, ensure you do it far enough ahead of time to enjoy its benefits, generally fifteen to thirty minutes prior to drinking.
GLASSWARE
The average person doesn't need and can't store ninety different types of glasses matched to each and every kind of wine. But the style of glassware does affect the enjoyment of wine, and, if you can, you should have a small assortment: white wine glasses, different glasses for older and younger reds, and smaller glasses for dessert wine. If you are truly pressed for space, choose one very good all-purpose glass: it should have a reasonably long stem, a bowl of about five to six fingers' height and tapering toward the rim (which should be sheer rather than beaded), and a capacity of eleven to fifteen ounces. If you can, select a ten- to fifteen-ounce all-purpose glass for whites and a high-quality glass with a capacity of fifteen to twenty-three ounces for reds. Champagne flutes are a great addition: choose glasses that are tall, with a slightly tapered sheer rim and a capacity of six to nine ounces. If you can add glasses for dessert wines, choose a smaller all-purpose glass with a tapered, sheer rim and a capacity of approximately eight ounces. Lead crystal is lovely, of course, but if that's too expensive or too fragile for your style, choose blown glass in preference to molded glass. Reputable and widely available, Riedel, Spiegelau, and Schott-Zwiesel glasses come in a range of styles.
THE 20/20 RULE
Always practice what my friend Leslie Sbrocco calls the 20/20 rule. Pull any young white wine that you intend to drink out of the fridge twenty minutes before you pop the cork, and pull the cork out of any young red wine at least twenty minutes before you intend to consume it. For older wines, wait until closer to serving time.
The condition of the glassware is also critical, as nothing spoils a wine more than a dirty glass or one coated with soap film. Glassware should be spotlessly clean; hand polishing with a clean, dry cloth adds a sparkle. (I am reminded of a fellow who once noted that all of his wines had a lemony aroma and discovered that his housekeeper had polished all his glassware with Lemon Pledge!)
Now you are equipped to enjoy a glass of wine and head to the stove!
CREATING PAIRINGS THAT WORK
The practice of pairing wine and food has been around for a long time. For many Europeans, for people who have grown up in households where wine is a part of daily life, and for folks who have spent time eating their way across France, Italy, Spain, and other gastronomically rich corners of the world, the notion of pairing wine and food is a happy and familiar one.
But for wine and food lovers in the United States, learning what goes with what has often been a roller-coaster ride. Knowing little about pairing wine and food, we first explored (and were handcuffed by) the European and classically grounded “old rules” of color coding: red wine with red meat, and white wines with fish and poultry. While there's some inherent value to those time-honored rules, they leave little to the imagination and discourage the freedom of mixing and matching. Once this became apparent, many Americans embraced culinary anarchy, with people deciding they could serve whatever wine with whatever food they wanted. This extreme encouraged an experimental spirit but led to more misses than hits. And when a memorable match occurred, the diner didn't know why it worked. I favor a middle course between those diametrically opposed approaches, because, as with most things in life, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between. I am both a firm advocate of the classics and a devout believer in shaking things up (and violating taboos) for the right reasons!
First and foremost, wine and food appreciation and enjoyment are personal. No two mouths react the same way to tastes. If somebody were to ask, “What's your most memorable wine and food experience?” at a dinner party (which, by the way, is fun to do), the responses would be all over the place. Most would be simple, formed more by memorable events and settings and good company than by the intricacies of the pairings themselves. Indeed, most people do not, thank goodness, spend their time overanalyzing wine and food and trying to pair, for example, the lemongrass and light green-olive flavors of XYZ Sauvignon Blanc with the tossed spring greens dressed with a lemongrass, citrus, and cold-pressed olive oil vinaigrette flecked with pieces of…green olive! This connect-the-dots approach to flavor, espoused by many epicurean magazines, even more winemakers, and a few too many chefs, is unnecessary and intimidating.
So what's really happening when you serve a particular wine with a particular food? Once the emotion and the heart are removed from our thinking, the more objective rationale lies in our intrinsic ability to ascertain characteristics that are “measured” in the mouth. Most of these quantifiable characteristics are referred to as primary tastes. But to understand taste, it is crucial to grasp the significant difference between taste and flavor. Though I get into this in more detail below, tastes are, simply stated, quantifiable—the sourness of a lemon, the sweetness of honey, the bitterness of dark chocolate, or the saltiness of a fresh oyster. All these tastes can be measured on a scale from low to high. On the other hand, the countless flavors—strawberry, butterscotch, steak—are personal, subjective, and impossible to measure.
If you move in circles that include wine aficionados, you are likely familiar with those who wax poetic about the pear and apple qualities of a Chardonnay, the apricot and nectarine flavors of a Riesling, or the black pepper and smoked-meat character in a glass of Syrah. We know there are not, in fact, essences of the above or any flavors added to wines. However, many people can, with experience, detect these suggestions of flavor, which are essentially reinforced aromas of the wine that is being enjoyed. Smell and taste are inextricably linked, as colds and allergies so frequently remind us. The ability to smell is essential to sensual appreciation of both wine and food. Without smell, your ability to appreciate the difference between pork and veal is significantly diminished, just as the ability to identify blackberry versus blueberry in a Merlot is moot. As we will