November 17, 2011
How to Choose a Good Wine
How to Choose a Good Wine
Wine can be an excellent accompaniment to a delicious meal, so it’s good to experiment until you find the suiting taste. In order to help you, I’ve devoted this blog to some advice about wine choosing.
Why is wine so important?
Wine has become a very important part of the meal (especially dinner), not only because it tastes good and in moderate amounts it’s very healthy, but also because an appropriate wine can enhance/upgrade the flavor of food. Wine cleans the palate area and zooms in on certain tastes while it counteracts the strong salty or bitter tastes. Actually wine can be used as any other spice.
Why is it so important to choose the right wine?
Even though we’ve said that wine can improve the taste of some foods, it can also ruin it changing it into a metallic, bitter or too sweet of a flavor. Some people dedicate their whole career to this art of paring a certain type of wine with food, having in mind the type of grapes it’s made from, the place where they’ve been stored, the age of the wine, etc.
Nevertheless, you don’t have to be a wine fanatic in order to choose the right wine for dinner.
What are the most important factors in wine choosing?
A good wine connoisseur can quickly detect all the flavors in a glass of wine and use them in order to perfectly match the food. However, for those of us wine novices, here’s some simple advice:
Consistency
A rough wine should be associated with strongly flavored food. Contrariwise you risk that the wine’s taste will overwhelm the food’s taste. For example, a strong merlot should be served with a very spicy lamb roast but never with grilled fish and lemon.
Flavor
Sweet wines go along very nicely with desserts and sweet flavored main courses, while wines that are a bit more acid and dry better accompany spicy sauces, salad dressings and salty food. Bitter wines counteract the bitter taste of sour foods. It’s also a good idea to make sure that the wines flavor is slightly stronger than the foods flavor. Otherwise the wine will seem a bit sour. For example don’t serve a very sweet desert with a semi-sweet wine.
Alcohol
Usually as a wine’s alcohol concentration is lower, the more appropriate it is to accompany a meal. Generally, it’s recommended you associate wines with foods that have the same characteristics (sweet wines with sweet foods, bitter wines with salty, spicy foods etc.). This also goes for the foods and wines color: combine white wines with white meat and red wines with red meat. Most of the red wines contain a bitter substance, called tannin, which best fits fat red meat (pork, veal).
Last two pieces of advice
Now that you’ve been familiarized with some of the basic food rules, we’ll let you in on a little secret: it’s okay to experiment every once in a while, even with tastes that theoretically wouldn’t match. There’s no strict wine rule, so don’t be afraid of experiments. Now follow the last two pieces of advice I’m going to give you:
Match the wine with your guests. You might think that a nice Riesling goes along with your seafood menu, but if your guests drink only red wine, they might not be too happy about your choice. So try to be a bit more attentive to the people that will be drinking the wine before you choose it.
Surprise mixes can be good. Like some cooks mix a pungent sauce with a sweet dessert, sometimes when breaking the rules it’s possible to get a delicious result. Don’t be afraid to experiment, especially when you tend to become a wine connoisseur.
CHEERS!
