April 2007 ACCESS Advantage

THE 10 COMMANDMENTS OF FOOD & WINE PAIRING!

Food & Wine Pairing

Master Sommelier Eddie Osterland offers up some tips for simplifying Food and Wine Pairing!  French-trained Eddie Osterland was the first of 87 Master Sommeliers in the United States and his credentials are impressive. Highly personable, he offers several programs in wine strategy and he prides himself on presenting these programs in a fun and exciting manner. The following was adapted from his power entertaining tips on “Food and Wine Pairing Made Simple”!

Commandment 1 – Match Quality
When pairing wine and food, you must always take into account the quality of the wine and the quality of your dish. A complex dish made for special occasions deserves a complex and special wine while everyday dishes match best with simple and easy to drink wines.

Commandment 2 – Match Power and Weight
Always take the relative power and weight of a wine and dish into account when making a pairing. The whole point of food and wine pairing is to make both the food and the wine taste better. If you cannot taste one or the other, then you are defeating the purpose. Eddie notes that pairing a Cabernet Sauvignon with delicately seasoned scallops results in a loss of the taste of scallop while a soft Riesling paired with a smoked venison chop is a mismatch as well.

Commandment 3 – Look into the Mirror
Mirror flavors and characteristics that a dish and a wine have in common. For example, if you have a peppery dish and want to emphasize the spicy pepper flavors, then select a wine that has peppery characteristics like a Zinfandel. Rich, buttery California Chardonnay has a natural affinity for rich and buttery lobster.

Commandment 4 – Fight Fat
Use acid and tannins to contrast fat in a dish. While fat provides a degree of flavor, it gets in the way of flavor when eating. There are two ways to neutralize fat in a dish. Use a wine that has a high tannin content, a high acid content, or both. Lighter dishes, like salmon, with high levels of fat are best paired with wines high in acidity while heavier dishes, requiring heavier wines that typically have lower acidity, should be paired to wines high in tannins such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot which aid in blocking fat.

Commandment 5 – Understand how Flavors Work Together
Flavors on the palate change the perceptions of flavors that follow them in a dramatic fashion and can make or break a wine pairing. In its simplest terms, salty and sour flavors bring out the positive characteristics and flavors of a food or wine while bitter, sweet, and savory flavors bring out the negative characteristics and flavors. Use these changes in perception to your advantage.

Commandment 6 – Think Locally
Pair regional wines with regional dishes. Common sense dictates that the wines and foods of a region pair well together.

Commandment 7 – See the Whole Picture
Take all of the components of a dish into account – the meat, sauce, etc. when selecting a wine. When pairing food and wine together, see the big picture. Pair the wine not only to the protein, but also the sauce, vegetables, and starch in a dish. By taking the entire dish into account, you will be selecting a wine that will pair much more successfully with the whole plate.

Commandment 8 – Success with Spice
Spicy foods pair best with slightly sweet wines and spicy foods are a bad match for high tannin wines. It can be tricky to select a wine to go with a spicy dish because spiciness in a dish is not something we taste; it is something we feel. By pairing spicy foods with a sweet wine, the sweetness in the wine will tame the heat of the dish and bring out more of its flavor. Avoid wines that are more tannic as they irritate the soft tissues in the mouth making the food hotter and the wine more tannic.

Commandment 9 – The Sweet Life
Dessert wines should always be sweeter than the dessert they are served with. Most sweet wines have a very intense level of acidity to them to balance out their sweetness. If that sweetness is stripped away from the wine, all that will show is that stark, raw acidity. By ensuring that your dessert wine is sweeter than your dessert, the wine will retain its natural sweetness.

Commandment 10 – Rules were made to be broken
The best thing about pairing wine and food is that it is always an interesting experiment in matching things together. Realize that there are no perfect food and wine pairings out there. Everyone tastes things differently and not everyone likes the same combinations.

Eddie encourages everyone to have fun with pairing, be willing to break any of the rules, and most importantly – drink what you like. The truth about pairing wine and food is that most wines go with most foods.

Whether your program features an interactive theme party, wine tasting reception or spouse program, allow ACCESS  Destination Services to tailor the perfect wine presentation formula to match the needs and demographics of your conference attendees.

back to top
back to top
back to top

Newsletter Sign up

Sign up for the ACCESS Advantage to have our future newsletters delivered straight to your inbox.
sign-up now

“I appreciate you working with me to keep my pricing down, while providing my people with a top notch program. It’s teamwork like this that benefits us all.”

Account Executive
Creative Group, Inc.