Only one of the two stars, either the wine or the dish, can effectively take center stage. If you want to show off a special bottle of wine, the food selection should play a supporting role. If you want to showcase a spectacular recipe, it's best to choose a lower-key wine. Much like two people in a conversation, in the wine and food partnership one must listen while the other speaks, or the result is a muddle.
Finally, wines change when served with food. Whatever your perception of a wine's flavor and personality when you taste it on its own, the wine won't be the same when tasted with a meal. Oddly, the most critically acclaimed wines are typically rated and scored alongside other wines of a similar genre but rarely actually tasted with food. Critics may say that sensational XYZ wine “goes well with pasta,” but in all likelihood this is no more than an educated guess. These wines may show gorgeously as solo performers, but when served with dinner they can seem different, or even downright unpleasant.
Armed with a context for our thinking and with the traditional epicurean paradigms questioned, let's agree that there are other quantifiable factors and rationales that bring wine and food together. The common wisdom is that wines and foods, like people, pair well with those that resemble them. Some successful wine and food pairings are grounded in shared characteristics. An off-dry Riesling served alongside a pork tenderloin with an apricot chutney illustrates this type of pairing: the sweetness of the chutney complements the slight sweetness of the wine. Other matches succeed through the truism that opposites attract. As with people, wines and foods can harmonize successfully despite seeming disparate at first glance. Ever wonder why a crisp glass of Sauvignon Blanc goes sublimely with a plate of raw oysters? Think of what a squeeze of lemon would do—cut through the oystery taste of the oyster. The wine acts the same way by countering the saline character of the oyster and refreshing the palate.
This “opposites attract” theory was cutting-edge, even radical, in the 1980s. Today, it's accepted and taught by many wine and food experts. At the root of this thinking is the principle that wines and foods share certain basic tastes. Tastes are not flavors. Tastes are simple, the core ones being sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. All are present to some degree in food, and different dishes reveal various combinations of them. For example, some cuisines are founded on plays of salt and sweet, such as a Thai chicken satay with peanut sauce, or salt-brined or dry-rubbed pork shoulder smoked slowly and served with a sweet, tangy barbecue sauce. Wine is also a play of basic tastes, of which three (sweet, sour, and bitter) are the building blocks that define a wine's profile and reveal how (and with what) it would be best served. This combination of tastes holds what I call the keys to wine and food matching. There are six of them for wine and three for food.
THE KEYS TO UNDERSTANDING WINE
KEY 1. ACIDITY
If you're betting on one horse, choose this one. It's the most important factor in pairing wine with food. There are several ways in which acidity, the sourness or tartness factor, figures in wine.
Acidity is the ultimate contrast to an array of dishes.
If you are seeking to “cut” a dish that is rich, salty, oily, fatty or mildly spicy, serving the dish alongside a tart-tasting wine will be effective and refreshing. Think of what I call the “lemon-wedge rule”: just as a squeeze of lemon juice will accent or “cut” a rich or salty dish (tempering the brininess of seafood, for example), an acidic wine will do the same. Foods served with cream-or butter-based sauces, oily or strong-tasting fish or shellfish, mildly piquant dishes, and virtually all deep-fried foods are prime candidates.
Acidic wines are the best wines to pair with tart foods.
Tart dishes, such as a green salad dressed with a vinaigrette, and sharp ingredients, such as capers, leeks, and tomatoes, harmonize best with wines of similar sharpness. A wine that is less tart than the dish it is accompanying will be thinned out and may come off quite unpleasantly. When serving wine with a sharp dish or ingredients, you would be hard-pressed to find a wine that is too tart! Examples of wines that can be too puckery on their own but sing with food include Pinot Blanc, cool-climate Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc, and some brut Champagnes.
Acidity brings out the integrity of good, simple ingredients.
I like to think of the acid in wines as the gastronomic equivalent of the yellow highlighter pen. The quick swoosh of the highlighter makes the words on a page stand out. A wine's acidity can mimic this phenomenon with food by bringing out the essence of an ingredient's flavor. The summer's first sweet corn or vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, freshly cracked boiled crab or lobster, and farm-fresh mozzarella cheese all take on another dimension when paired simply with a sharp, uncomplicated wine to make their vibrant and delicious flavor “pop.”
Acidity allows a tart wine, which may seem too sharp for sipping on its own, to work perfectly in conjunction with food. To some it is counterintuitive to think that a sour, unpleasant bottle can turn into liquid magic at the table—but sometimes life is stranger than fiction.
By the way, low-acid wines are more difficult to match with food. It's best to serve them with milder ingredients that contain a touch of sharpness (such as a squeeze of lemon). A flat Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay may perk up if paired with an otherwise mild fish mousse served with a wedge of lemon and a tangy jicama salad. With some experimentation and exploration, the role of acidity, and its importance, will become increasingly clear to you.
KEY 2. SWEETNESS
Wines can be sweet in varying degrees. Unctuous dessert wines have specific serving guidelines, which I cover in the dessert wine section. Wines can also be off-dry (a little sweet) or semi-dry (medium sweet). We often find a little sweetness in Rieslings, Chenin Blancs, lighter-style Muscats, and some styles of sparkling wine.
Sweetness is a great counterbalance to moderate levels of spicy heat.
Many Asian preparations, such as spicy Korean barbecued chicken or the archetypal Chinese twice-cooked pork, need not be paired exclusively with beer! Here, moderate amounts of sweetness in the wine provide a nice foil for the heat and tame its ferocity, even alleviating the burning sensation caused by the peppers.
Sweetness in the wine can complement a slight sweetness in food.
Offering an off-dry Chenin Blanc with a fillet of grouper, served with a fresh mango salsa, would be a good example of this observation. Others would include pairing sweet wines with dishes accompanied by chutney or sauces made with fresh or reconstituted dried fruit (such as raisins, apricots, and cherries). The fruit flavors resonate well with most off-dry wines.
Sweetness can be an effective contrast to salt.
This is the rationale behind the long-established matches of French Sauternes with salty Roquefort (and similar blue cheeses) and port with English Stilton. However, this genre of pairing requires some experimenting, as not all of these marriages are happy ones.
Sweetness can take the edge off foods that are too tart.
This type of contrast requires precise balance, or the food can make the wine come across as sour. Many Asian appetizers with vinaigrettes, at once tart and sweet, pair seamlessly with off-dry wines. The ever-popular green papaya salad, found in the cuisines of Thailand, Vietnam, and Myanmar, is a classic example.
Dessert-style or extremely sweet wines must be sweeter than the dessert itself.
The wisdom of this rule is evident to anybody who has ever attended a wedding and experienced the unfortunate pairing of expensive dry brut Champagne with cake covered in gloppy, white buttercream frosting. Dom Perignon suddenly tastes like lemony seltzer water. At