Tips for Pairing Wine with Food
The first and most important rule with food pairing is don't feel restricted by the established boundaries and go with whatever you think will work. There are enough established food and wine pairings to make your mouth water and your imagination to roam. We've had a few thousand years to experiment and decide on sure fire pairings like oysters and champagne, but as each wine and each dish morphs into it's own personality, these established norms can become repetitive and restrictive. The main idea with cooking and pairing wines is to be creative and make something unique which is memorable. In this spirit, it can be very rewarding to leave the norms behind and experiment. As Michel Couvreux, the sommelier at CRU in New York, says:
"Sometimes you want zee wine to match zee food, or zee sauce, and sometimes zee wine must stand up to zee food. Zey must challenge each other, zey must fight!"
In an effort to not rewrite what has been written so many times, we have included many links below into which you can endlessly search food and wine pairings. There is however one point which must be made.
The tannins in red wine have a natural "drying" effect on the mouth. In essence, what is happening is that the tannins from the wine are pulling the fat molecules that naturally occur in your cheeks to help break down food and facilitate eating. In this vein, red wines will almost always taste better with fatty foods and white wines better with less fatty foods. This is by no means an absolute rule and is meant to be broken by inventive chefs, but if you have ever wondered why this was the case, now you know.