A Wine Romance: Matchmaking Food To Wine

Matching the perfect wine to your meal is a scary, scary task (even if you have the cool tea towels Sian showed us yesterday). Not because you're not savvy enough, though, but because it's mission impossible: there is no perfect wine. So you can take a deep breath and put your feet up.

Yeah, there are guidelines you can follow, but your own tastes are as important as what the experts say, and just because a wine is a textbook match it does not mean you'll be head over heels with it. What I mean is: just because George Clooney ticks all the boxes, doesn't mean you wouldn't sometimes rather go on a date with Russell Kane. Just me? Oh. Anyway, you get my drift.

Basically: relax. Remember what you like. And if you want to learn the sciencey stuff, just try and remember the word balance:

Body

Big, beefy food needs big, beefy wine. Aussie Shiraz, hearty Rhones etc. Carmenere from Chile is a favourite of mine in these cases, such as the Tesco Finest offering from £5.99.

More delicate dishes will get lost unless you find a similarly sensitive bottle of vino: creamy chicken just needs a simple, creamy Chardonnay, not all the gooseberry fireworks of a Sauvignon.

Acidity

Sometimes you need to match acidity, such as dishes full of things like vinegar, tomatoes or lemon juice. Low acidity wines would feel flat with these foods, and the same goes for red as well as white: for instance, I'd serve food with tart, tomatoey sauce with a young Italian red like Mondelli Montepulciano d'Abruzzo for £9.99 in Sainsburys.

On the other hand, it's lovely to use acidity to 'cut through' certain foods: for instance, in the case of oily smoked fish. You'd happily squeeze a lemon over food like that, and serving a crisp Loire sauvignon (like this Touraine Sauvignon from Selfridges for £8.99) can be tastebud heaven in exactly the same way.

Texture

This is one of my favourite matches. Fatty foods, like duck or pork, love a fatty wine. Grapes like viognier and Alsace Pinot Gris can step up to the plate. The Yali Reserva Viognier is a delicious example of this, for £6.79 from Majestic if you buy two bottles.

Herbs and spices

The more aromatic your dish, the more pungent the wine. Chinese food is my bezza, so I always have a Gewurztraminer nearby, such as Zarcillo Gewurztraminer from The Wine Society at £6.25. Similarly, if your flavours are on the subtle side, try and find an elegant wine to match.

Sweet Opposites

Lastly, if your food is going to either be a salty or spicy feast, think about how opposites attract: like a honey-glaze on salty pork, or sticking fruit in your curry, a sweet wine can be just what you need. Maybe something like this versatile Vouvray Demi-Sec from Yapp Brothers for £10.95.

Do you have a food and wine matching conundrum? What are your failsafes? Tell us about it in the comments, or on our Twitter and Facebook pages.

Photo by Oiram Ziul

Weekly Wine: Wine is From Venus, Chocolate is from Mars

Oh, sweet chocolate. Oh, delicious wine. I love you both in equal measure, so why can't you just get along? For too long I've believed all the horror stores I've read about pairing wine with chocolate, and had to sacrifice one for the other on those chilly winter evenings in. Okay, okay, so maybe this is like the most watered down Sophie's Choice ever, but I'm writing to tell you that after months of gruelling experiments (ahem) I've found some devillishly good matches to share with you all.

The problem with chocolate is it coats your tongue more than most foods, so drinking wine (even the sweet stuff) after eating it can leave you with a bitter taste. You need to find something equally rich as well as sweet, and the answer tends to be to go with something a little fortified - this does mean you get a little more sauce in your glass, though, so it's not necessarily bad news.

Dear Madeira

It may be the stuff that you imagine only your gran drinks, but Madeira is seriously good with the chocolatey stuff. My number one example is the Henriques and Henriques 10yo Malmsey - I had it at Christmas last year with the post-dinner truffles and, even though I had already stuffed my face with enough to feed a small village, I still couldn't stop eating and drinking this super rich and warming combination. You can pick up a bottle from a number of places, but one of the cheapest I've found is KWM for £16.99 per 50cl bottle. Alternatively Tesco do a younger version for £10.99 which isn't quite as rich, but will probably do the job.


Sparkles

I've mentioned this before a few weeks back but you can't beat the Bleasdale Sparkling Shiraz with a slab of chocolate cake - it's rich and robust enough to be the perfect match. You can grab a bottle for £15.99 from Fine Wines Direct.


Fortified French

I mentioned Tannat a few weeks back too - it's the grape variety that grabbed a load of press last year for being the best for your heart - but it also makes a mean chocolate wine in some forms. The Maydie Tannat Vintage £13.95 from The Wine Society and is truly moreish: dark, sweet without being flimsy, and oh so rich. Heaven with chocolate tart.

Another fortified beauty from the South of France is the Maury Solera 1928. It's Malmsey-like, and drawn from a cask that was first filled in 1928 so they've had enough time to get it right. You can pick up a 50cl bottle from The Imperial Wine Company for £16.05.

What's your favourite tipple with chocolate? Tell us (or ask us for help with any other wine & food nightmare combinations) on our Twitter and Facebook pages.
Image taken from John Loo's photostream under the Creative Commons license.

Weekly Wine: From Dry To Sweet

We all love a good glass of vino (or four) and the beauty of wine is that everyone's tastes are different, so giving wine advice should be a much easier job than it is. I always say you should be quaffing whatever tickles your fancy, but sometimes it's nice to know the sciencey bit behind matching different wines to different things.

I thought I'd start with a straightforward one: dry, medium and sweet wines. A wine's sweetness has a huge impact on its character and what you can eat with it to make it that bit tastier.

So what is a sweet wine? It's easy to mistake a wine that is lip-smackingly fruity as being 'sweet', but if you focus on the sugariness of a wine you should find it easier to work out its sweet-factor: try drinking it with a sticky toffee pudding, for example, and you'll soon realise if your wine is dry or not - the flavours just won't match and the wine will become harsh and unpleasant.

A wine's sweetness is based on how much 'residual sugar' it has: winemakers either add sugar to their wine, or (much more commonly) try and keep as much of the natural sugar from the grapes as possible (by harvesting the grapes later so they are more shrivelled and concentrated, or by stopping fermentation to prevent all the sugar from converting into alcohol, but that's just me being a geek so don't worry too much).

Dry wines

Most of the wine we glug on a daily basis is dry, which is good because if we drank sweet wine with the same enthusiasm I'm pretty sure none of us would have any teeth left. Dry wines match the greatest variety of foods, so before I wax lyrical all day about all my favourite pairings let me just give you two perfect examples which are scrumptious to try:

1. Goats cheese and a dry French sauvignon

Goats cheese needs a dry white wine to match its high acidity, and it's strong flavours are best matched with the pungency of a sauvignon blanc. Loire sauvignons are a bit more subtle flavour-wise than their New Zealand counterparts, and this Touraine Sauvignon from Laithwaites is a perfect example. It's £9.99.

2. Dry rose with summer salads

Any summer barbecue or picnic has a wide range of salads and nibbles, and it's not surprising that dry rose is so popular at this time of year, as it's a super accompaniment to this kind of food. Again, it all comes down to the crispness of the wine that matches the acidity found in summer salads. A good Provence rose is bone-dry and is elegant and balanced, so it won't fight too much with the mish-mash of characteristics found in this type of food. Waitrose do a lovely, light-pink example for £6.40 a bottle.

Medium wines

Medium wines are too often overlooked as being unsuitable for food, but that little bit of sugar can prove to be the best thing some dishes could ask for.

We already match sweetness with savoury dishes all the time - what do we love with pork? Apple sauce. What do we slather all over gammon? Honey glaze. I'm getting a bit drooly just thinking about it. And I love nothing more than having any pork dish (even cocktail sausages - I kid you not) with an off-dry riesling from Germany. They're so appley and fresh, it's like they're made to offset the saltiness of pork. My favourite is The Society's Saar Riesling from The Wine Society at £8.95 - you have to join as a member to order though.

The same works for chicken too, especially in fruity oriental dishes. I very much heart eating these kinds of things with an off-dry rose such as Rose D'Anjou from the Loire region of France, and Marks and Spencers do a smashing version for £5.99.

Off-dry red wine is not particualrly common or popular, but I've yet to find a better match for chocolate desserts: it has just the right amount of richness, and isn't so acidic that it clashes with the bitterness of chocolate. The Australians make an absolute cracker: Bleasdale Sparkling Shiraz is £19.75 from Formula Wines and is awesome with chocolate cake.

Sweet Wines

There's so many types of sweet wine, it can be a bit overwhelming knowing where to start.

A lighter dessert (something fruity or gently creamy) needs a similarly light sweet wine - anything too heavy can make the dessert seem less sweet. I'd try something like Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise, and Berry Bros stock a delicious one at £17.85 for those special occasions.

More lustrous sweet wine is an ideal match for exceptionally salty cheese like stilton as they counter-balance each other - Tesco Finest Sauternes is £12.99 per half, and this will be perfect. It can seem surprising, but sweet red wine can do the job just as well and is often less expensive. Nuy Red Muskadel from South Africa is £10.99 from Corks Out, and is my cheeseboard's best friend.

So there you have it. I'll be back next week with more winey-goodness, so if you have a question about wine then give us a shout on Twitter or Facebook!

Image used from Naomi Ibuki's photostream on flickr under the creative commons license.