Pairing Wine and Food: Tasting, Enjoying, and Learning about Food and Wine Matches 

Wines taste best with food, but which wines with which dishes? Behind the marriage of luscious dishes and  harmonious wines, lies a smorgasbord of ideas about food and wine pairing. There are the very laid-back theories - “If it’s a kind of food you like and a wine you enjoy, go for it!”, or “It’s not so much the wine and the food as the company and the occasion that matters.” There is truth in both these perspectives, but most of us would not enjoy matching a sweet cake with a dry white or a high alcohol red with a hot (spicy) dish, no matter how much you liked the wine separate from the food or the people you were with!

Other theories emphasize matching wines and foods from the same region. This works spectacularly at times, such as in the pairing of the Loire Valley’s Crottin Chavignol goat cheese with the local Sancerre Sauvignon Blanc. However, when looking for the best cheese match for Portugal’s Port, most gourmets go across the sea to England for its stilton cheese, rather than pick a local Portuguese cheese. Nevertheless, the local wine and food customs should not be ignored as they often point to very good matches.

Many writers on food and wine look to mirror or balance the flavor and “weight” (body, intensity and persistence of flavors) of the food and wines: i.e. they would suggest you forego your favorite tannic, oaky, block buster red when ordering the delicate, sautéed filet of sole.  But even balancing flavors and weight may not succeed if the food is dominated by spicy or acidic, bitter, sweet, or umami tastes. When one or more of these tastes dominate they will heighten disagreeably the bitterness, dryness, astringency, and acidity of wines, particularly those wines already high in these tastes.  

These perspectives on food and wine matches will be helpful in developing some simple guidelines.  The fun part is getting to the actual tasting of wines and food, where no doubt we will discover that our palates and preferences differ, and where some of the guidelines are more useful than others.  Class 1: we taste six classic food and wine matches and the pairing principles they demonstrate; Class 2: we match typical French appetizers, sauces, entrees, and cheeses with the wines with which they go best; Class 3: we savor a variety of Italian regional dishes and the best Italian wine matches; Class 4: we take on a variety of food styles – American Barbecued, Chinese sweet and sour, and Thai and Indian spicy dishes, and discover the wines that best complement these foods.
Tasting dishes prepared by Chef William Miller of the Hilton Rye Town. Six to eight wines will be paired each evening.
                Dates: four Tuesdays: November 4, 11, 18, and December 2. (course given again in April)
                Fee: $390 for four classes; $115 per individual class
                Registration: call the WWS at 914-478-5197.