Wine and Food Pairings

Pairing foods with wines is very much like discovering wonderful new recipes. Just as the right combination of ingredients complements and highlights each other to create a gourmet dish, pairing the right wine with a meal creates a combination that celebrates and enhances the experience of both food and wine.

And, just as a recipe doesn’t have to be complex to be mouth-wateringly good, you don’t have to be a wine connoisseur or gourmet cook to enjoy the benefits of the right wine pairing.

A basic understanding of the food, the wine and how the components and flavors in each interact can make it easy to find a successful pairing on a daily basis, and can greatly increase the chances of finding an exciting synergy between wine and food
Start with the Wine
When you’re first trying your hand at pairing, we recommend starting with a wine and then selecting and creating the food around it. The simple reason for this is that it’s much easier to tweak a food recipe to make it more compatible with the wine, than it is to start blending your own wines.

Pick a wine you know and love already. This way, you’ll have a sense of its flavors already, which you can use as a starting point to experiment with food pairings. Plus, if the recipe doesn’t work, at the very least you’ll be able to enjoy a nice bottle of wine!
Be ‘Prepared’ With The Food
Forget the white wine with white meat and red with red meats. The best place to begin your food selection is with an understanding of how the food is being prepared – the components and flavors in the dish that are integral to pairing it with wine. This is why food and wine pairing in restaurants can be challenging. You think that everything will be fine and then discover that the dish has a different flavor (Why did the chef add olives, they didn’t mention them on the menu?), texture (Wow, I didn’t know that the sea scallops and bay scallops are so different!) or cooking method (I expected the chicken to be grilled, but it is poached.).
Three Key Points
To keep in mind when selecting the food are
1. The food item being paired;
2. The cooking method of that item; and
3. The additional flavors or sauces

The fundamental rule is to begin by pairing delicate wines with delicate flavors, medium-bodied wines with medium-weight or intensity flavors, and strongly flavored foods with wines that will stand up to their pungency. To help keep things simple as you get started, we’ve put together the following guide. Like anything, these are not absolute rules, but good guidelines to follow to help create the most successful and interesting pairings.
FLAVORS Delicate Earthy; Hearty Meaty Pungent Spicy
WINE TYPE Riesling
Sauvignon Blanc Chardonnay
Viognier
Pinot Noir
Sangiovese
Merlot Cabernet Sauvignon
Syrah
Zinfandel
FOODS Salads/Vegetables Fish Poultry, Game Birds, Pork, Veal Beef, Offal
SAUCES Lemon based Butter; Cream Meat
Wine Demiglace
PREPARATION Poached/Steamed Sautéed Baked Roasted Grilled Braised

For a more comprehensive chart, check out our Wine and Food Pairing Chart

To make the wine even more compatible you can use the sauce to try to imitate flavors in the wine. For instance, mushrooms work well with Pinot Noir, tomatoes with Sangiovese, herbs and mint with Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, and dark berries with Shiraz.

As we noted, it’s not critical that you memorize this guide and follow it to the letter. The important point is to use this to help learn how the different types of flavors pair with different wines. This understanding of food components and wine flavors is actually much more helpful that simply matching a food to a wine and the basic chicken breast is a great example of why.