Matching Food with Wine

Unlike Americans, Europeans do not regard wine so much as an alcoholic drink as another food category. I find this concept very liberating in the kitchen as it introduces wonderful flavors to savor both in the food and in the accompanying beverage. A second liberating concept is to get rid of the false correlation between wine and snobbery, i.e. the fear of either buying a bad wine or having to spend too much money for a good bottle. With so much of the world now making very good wine, it's easy and fun to find good value. And who has time to really know all about the great Europeans, the up and coming South American and South Afican wines, the really tasty Australian and New Zealand wines, the new German models, and U.S. wine from New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and Texas. With these two concepts, it's much easier to think of wine as a food to buy and experiment with, like new cheeses, chocolates, or bread. As with most experiments, a few guidelines help, and I have listed them below as well as a few personal favorites.

When choosing a wine for either cooking or drinking, there are a couple of basic premises that still leave lots of room to experiment. First, match the wine's primary taste characteristic with that of the food's primary taste characteristic, i.e. like with like. Acidic wines go well with acidic and/or salty foods, sweet food goes with sweeter wines; bitter wines, (those with real tannin - puckery power), go well with bitter foods. The combination of two similar tastes actually works to downplay the primary taste and bring additional complexities to a dish. The classic pairings follow this line. You'll see a dry Sauvignon Blanc served with Oysters (salty) or fish in a citrus sauce (acidic). Chardonnay, which can be sweet, often works well with meat served in a fruit sauce, or lobster. Cabernet, a wine with a lot of tannin, works especially well with grilled meats, as the grilling process brings in an element of bitterness. If you want to follow this rule, remember to look at the strongest tasting element of the dish, i.e. a chicken with a heavy tomato sauce can use a very different wine (hearty red) than a chicken with a lemon, garlic sauce (acidic white).

There are, however, a couple of "do nots". Never cook with "cooking wine". The reason that cooking wine can be sold in grocery stores and other places that are not licensed to sell liquor is that cooking wine has so much added salt it is considered undrinkable. Enough said. Also, any wine under $5.00/bottle is going to be problematic. A key fact to remember when cooking with wine is that the wine's taste will be concentrated as the liquid or sauce is cooked down; therefore the basic taste elements will become more concentrated. Most very inexpensive wine is sweet, and can develop a syrupy taste when cooked. Also, wine can break down when reduced too rapidly, so with all wine sauces, reduce at a slower boil but use a wider surface, i.e. use a skillet rather than a saucepan.

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