Pairing Food and Wine

Up until this point, I’ve been happily chatting away about food and my journey in learning to cook or wines I’ve found and what I think about them. Personally, I think there’s a lot of really good information in those posts, especially if one takes the time to read all the stuff, not just the recipes or reviews. Today though, we’re going to make a bit of a change and begin talking about food and wine together.

Clearly, food and wine go together like Abbot and Costello. However, one of the great mysteries in this world is how to go about pairing food and wine together. I certainly had no clue how to go about doing this other than to taste the food and try and figure out all the flavors in there, then to taste the wine, figure out all the flavors in there and then to create this mental database of all the foods and wines that I’ve tasted and then to cross reference them whenever I tried to make a food and wine pairing. The sad part is for most of history, that’s exactly what people did.

The other tried and true method of pairing food and wine was to rely on regional pairings. You had to figure that food that came from a specific region of the world, something like a seafood paella from the Galicia region of Spain would pair up with a nice wine from that region like a light and crisp Albariño from the same region. Of course, this would be a magical pairing, but there is the underlying question as to why these things work together.

My eyes were opened to a simpler way of thinking about food and wine pairings during the Society of Wine Educators Conference I went to last summer. There, I attended a breakout session given by Jerry Comfort, the Culinary Director for Beringer Vineyards in California which totally changed my way of thinking about food and wine pairings. There underlying premise is that food and wines work together based on human physiology and exactly what we can and cannot taste. Since then, I’ve been doing some research on this and over the next several weeks, I’m going to break down my understanding of this topic. I hope you stick around for this, because I think this is really cool.