February is food and wine month at Cellarmasters - our fabulous wine partner.
They have loads of great tools to help navigate the path of food and wine matching – including a handy matching wheel and Stu Robinsons video wine tips.
Here they help us take our first steps. Does your wine tell you what you have for dinner?
There’s nothing better than discovering a food and wine combination that bring out the best in taste and texture. We’ve teamed up with the experts at cellarmasters.com.au to combine our expertise in food with their expertise in wine.
The first rule to know when it comes to food and wine is that there are no hard and fast rules. In Europe, food and wine matching has evolved over hundreds of years, so it’s no coincidence that some of the most famous wine regions are equally renowned for their local cuisine. While we don’t have such a long tradition in Australia, we do have greater freedom to experiment and try new matches.
We’re blessed with plenty of high quality, fresh produce and a great variety of wine styles, ranging from delicate and crisp to flavoursome and mouthfilling. Our multi-cultural society gives us access to a wide range of dishes and ingredients from indigenous ‘bush tucker’ to Middle Eastern, African, South Asian, Chinese and South East Asian cuisines.
When you’re matching food and wine, it helps to have an understanding of the basic tastes of sweet, bitter and sour, along with the weight, intensity and texture of both the food and wine. It’s advisable to start a meal with dry wine before moving to sweet, and also to progress from light-bodied wines to full bodied – whites and reds alike.
While there are no hard and fast rules, there are two schools of thought – complementary or contrasting. Complementary is about matching like with like, striking harmony between flavours and textures on the plate and in the glass or matching the weight of a wine with the weight of the dish. This involves tasting, and identifying the ingredients, both subtle and dominant, in the dish, then looking for a wine that makes a complementary match. Some good examples of this would be mushroom risotto with Pinot Noir, rich roast lamb with a firm, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon, or grilled white fish with an unoaked dry Riesling.
The contrasting approach pairs ‘opposing’ food and wine to reach a balance of flavour intensity and texture through their interaction. A good example of this is to match shellfish in a rich butter sauce with a young, zesty Semillon Sauvignon Blanc blend, where the brisk acidity cuts through the richness of the dish. Or you might like to try the controversial approach of matching a cut of red meat to a light-bodied red such as Pinot Noir rather than a heavy, full-bodied Shiraz. Take note of the ingredients being used in a dish and select a wine style to suit, or contrast. The spiciness of a Szechuan cuisine can be brought out with a cool-climate, spicy Shiraz, or tempered by a clear-as-glass, young Hunter Valley Semillon. You could lift the aromatic qualities of cumin and coriander found in Indian dishes with an aromatic white wine such as Viognier or the Italian Arneis grape.
And remember that sometimes little differences in wine style can make big differences in the way wines interact with food.
It may sound strange, but sometimes it pays to even forget about the colour of the wine. While you’ll always have your own favourites, and the so-called ‘classic matches’ may seem to be a safe bet, don’t forget that there are no rules, other than you should experiment and enjoy the food and food and wine experience.
To find the right wine for your next culinary adventure, go to cellarmasters.com.au/foodandwine
Cheers!
