Hey y'all it's Madeleine I want to explain the basics behind food and
so you can create pairings on your own. In order to do so, I'm using an infographic poster called the food and wine pairing chart that I created for Wine Folly, so we can sort of
vet some pairings together. But before we get into all of that, let's understand the basics, the fundamentals of flavor pairing.
The process of
involves
balancing tastes with one another. There are essentially five
building blocks of taste to construct flavor pairings: bitter, sweet, salt, fat and acid.
The topic of flavor pairing goes pretty deep. There are now other flavors we've learned and understood that go beyond just the five fundamental tastes, including or or which means , so you can go crazy if you want to, but I like to keep things simple not only because you're learning, but as soon as you add wine it gets more complicated.
When I'm thinking about pairing wines with food, I like to think of the wine more as an ingredient with attributes than as just wine itself. Wine as an ingredient is a with a lower pH which means fundamentally it's on the of the spectrum.
When you have a good understanding of the fundamental tastes in the different styles of wines, it's actually pretty easy to come up with food and wine pairings
on your own in your head.
However, if you're just getting started, I totally understand, we created this
chart I'm gonna link it here, up there, maybe down there, so you can take a look at it on your own and start practicing pairings, all right! Here's how the chart works: on the
there are nine styles of wine, on the
there are food ingredients which are organized by type. You'll see the recommended pairings for these ingredients as you go across the x-axis.
Dots indicate a pairing and large dots indicate an excellent pairing. So if you want to create your own pairing, identify the major ingredients in your dish, the sort of the
, and then use the chart to find recommended wines.
So for example, let's say I want to pair a BLT sandwich on
wheat bread. I would then identify the major ingredients. Well, bacon is definitely a major ingredient, there's lettuce but it's more of a textural thing, tomato is an ingredient and so is the
bread. So those three ingredients I will find on the chart, there's bacon, bacon seems to go well with a light red wine and a sweet red wine, then there's tomato, tomato will go with a
red wine but it'll also pair with a sweet wine, and then finally we have the wheat bread which goes with several different wine styles, and it looks like it will also go with a sweet white wine too. I might be picking a sweet white wine to go with my BLT and as it happens Riesling, an
off dry Riesling is an excellent pairing with a BLT sandwich.
Alright I hope you enjoyed this little wine and food pairing demo and have fun making wonderful pairings.