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Winery-Sage: Your Easy Guide To Holiday Food & Wine Pairings

By Karen and Ken Geiszler, Winery-Sage.com — 

Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a first timer, if you are planning to serve wine with your holiday meal, serving the right type of wine can’t be overstated. Below, we’ve provided some general terms and guidelines along with some handy links that are good to have at your fingertips.

Once you’ve read through this, check out our next three posts that describe more details for paring wines with appetizers, main courses, and desserts.

Know These Terms and You’re On Your Way

Acid – If you taste a wine and it’s tart, the wine has a higher acid content. Well-balanced white wines with good acid are often called crisp. If your wine tastes like vinegar, it’s due to the acid, and a really badly made wine.  They are sometimes good for cooking but rarely worthwhile drinking.

Fruit – The sweetness that you taste in wine is usually attributed to the fruit. Fruit in wine usually comes from being produced with riper grapes. Unripe fruit usually produce wines that are more acidic. With most wine grape Varietals, as the fruit ripens, the sugar content rises but the acid content drops. It’s rare to get a wine that is both high in fruit and acid without resorting to additives.

Tannins – These are key to what is often described as “mouth feel.” Wines high in tannins are often described as having a “feel” of leather or fur. They are also the component that can leave your mouth feeling dry. They come from the skins, seeds, and stems from the grape bunches. They also come from new barrels in which a wine is aged. Wines aged in neutral oak add very few tannins. Neutral oak refers to a barrel that has been used so many of the flavors have been leached out of it by previous batches of wine. Excessive tannins can make a wine bitter and are often prevalent in young wines that are meant to age. Age will usually soften the tannins and round out the wine.

General Rules

The comments below are general guidelines to use when considering food and wine pairings this holiday season:

  1. Never serve a dish that is sweeter than the Red Wine Glassesaccompanying wine. If you want to know why, find a sweet white wine like a US Gewurztraminer, most of the US Rieslings, or even a White Zinfandel. Take a couple of sips of the wine and then eat a sweet cookie or a bite of cake. Now take another sip of the wine. Odds are, the wine that just tasted very sweet just moments ago will now taste tart and not very appealing. The sugar in the dessert has swamped the sugars and fruit in the wine.
  2. Generally, fattier meats do well with wines that have more tannins and can also stand up to higher alcohol levels. The fat in the meats coats your mouth in the same way that snow accumulates on a road. Tannins act like road plows on a snowy day, clearing away fat deposits in your mouth so your next bite of meat will taste much like your first bite. Conversely, the fat coating your mouth softens the tannins in the wine by only allowing some of them to hit your pallet.
  3. Match flavor intensities. Bold tasting meals should be paired with bold tasting wines. Subtle flavors in food require subtle flavors in wine. It’s probably not really a surprise by this point but acidic food should be paired with acidic wine.
  4. Don’t drink an acidic wine with a cream based sauce. Just don’t do it – put the bottle down and walk away. If you want to know why, try this experiment — aka joke — on a friend. Be sure to stay far enough away so that when they take a swing at you, you have a chance to duck. Have you friend take a shot of any cream based liquor like Baileys Irish Cream, keep it in their mouth, and the take a shot of Rose’s Lime Juice with the Baileys still in their mouth. What you’ve created is a drink called a “Cement Mixer.” The Rose’s Lime Juice causes the cream to curdle and solidify, which is great fun for those watching but not so much for the one with the newly formed glue in their mouth. Albeit to a lesser degree, this is why acidic wines and cream based sauces don’t get along.
  5. Don’t try and pair a wine with a side dish unless you are serving your meal one course at a time. Match the main course instead. Finding a wine that complements something sweet, like maple-baked beans, for example, will likely ruin the flavor of your other savory dishes. If you want to plan your food and wine offering together, then try and avoid sweet and savory dishes in the same meal. Dishes with subtle flavors and dishes with bold flavors are easier to pair with wine if you are looking for a contrast in taste. Also look at contrasting textures of food rather just tastes if you want more variety in your meal.

Winery-Sage Tools for Great Food and Wine Parings

If you are trying to find the right meal to accompany a specific type of wine, you can find hints here.

For ideas on what wine to pair with your meal, try the Winery Sage Wizard.

Now that you have mastered the basics and learned a few helpful sites, be on the lookout for our upcoming, specific suggestions for pairing wine and appetizers. If you have a favorite yourself, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Enjoy! — Karen and Ken Geiszler, Winery-Sage.com

Winery Sage is a community of those who make wine and those who enjoy it. If you’re passionate about wine or merely curious, this is your total resource for quick answers or serious research on wine so pop open a bottle, pour yourself a glass and have a look around. If you are a winery, make sure you are listed in our database by clicking on the link below.

Karen and Ken have now been married for almost 25 years and to date have still not had a fight since being married, probably because Karen has the patience of a saint. They live in the Silicon Valley area but have had a cabin just south of Yosemite, in the Bass lake area, for roughly 13 years. They spend as much time up here as they can. The first 10 years was just relaxation. The last three has been lots of work recovering from damage caused by the Courtney Fire and then continuing on with a remodel. In 2018, they hope to spend as much as a third of their time up at the cabin.

They are now empty-nesters with their older son being married and living in London with his new wife for the next two years, and the younger one living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, getting his PhD in Bioinformatics. From where he got the brains is a complete mystery but the best guess is the dog. They are not sure what they did to drive their kids so far away but the only consolation is that both sons claim to want to move back in the future.

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