Food and wine pairing – part 1

Article taken from milaewines.it by Mihaela Cojocaru

Many people are trying to do the perfect match and lose side of the simple and joyble mean of food and wine pairing.

I belive that 10% of the wine and food matches are fantastic, 10% don’t work at all and 80% it’s all ok. So don’t get too stress about it!

The key is if you like the food and you like the wines there is a small risk that it will become a really bad combination, but if you don’t like the wine or the food it is a significant risk even if the combination works brilliantly you won’t like it!

There are other guidelines to wine and food matching that you should consider: it is a personal experience and it is impossible to find a combination everybody will like. But you can work with some natural characteristics and understandings so that almost all the people can enjoy the combination.

With food and wine matching is one part science, two parts magic 🙂

Before we look into specific directions with food and wine, I would like to explain how different parts of the wine work together. We hear people talking about balance, but I fund that a lot of people don’t understand the balance of wine and to really knows how food changes the balance of the wine you need to understand how wine works on it’s own.

If you add some sugar to an acidic wine the sugar goes up and the acidity goes down. All the nice things in wine: sugar, fruit and body are one side of the balance and all the nasty stuff: tannins, acidity and the heat of the alcohol are on the other.

If I add sugar to the wine, the sugar in the wine goes up, but also it enhances the fruit and the body in the wine. The perception of the acidity goes down, even though the actual level doesn’t change, and so does the tannin and the heating feeling.

If I add a little bit of lemon juice to my wine the oppsite thing happens. The acidity appears to go up dragging up the tannins annd increasing the sensation of the alcohol burning. The extra acidity masks the sugar in the wines and pushes down the fruitiness making the wine taste thinner with less body. That’s why the wine taste lighter and harder.

By eating food you do a similar thing. Your mouth will become accoustomized to taste a certain thing.

read also Wine and Food pairing – part 2

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