That is great. Because the very last thing you want to do is pair an Italian wine with that dish. Italian wines are hard to find, expensive and don’t really go well with pasta. And if you really think about it, the Italians don’t really know much about pasta. Or wine for that matter.
You’ve obviously never been to my house! 
LOL
Well, his PN could mean Pinot Nero, or even Piemonte Nebbiolo. 
I often drink just a third to half bottle with dinner, and finish the bottle with tomorrow’s dinner. So though I have plenty from Italy, sometimes pasta gets a French or domestic pinot. A nice bright high acid low alcohol pinot ain’t a horrible way to go with red sauce, even if something for half the price from It’ly would do so with twice the panache.
Can’t speak for others, but this is definitely not the case in our house. We drink oceans of Riesling, champagne, rose and northern Italian reds that aren’t Barolo/Barbaresco. Our cellar contains large amounts of more “mainstream” wines, but we reach for them less often because we eat food that goes with them less often. We cook at home a lot and always consider what will be a good pairing, so that most of the time our wine choices are at least informed by what we plan to eat.
We almost never drink wine without food. Even Champagne is poured with cheeses or charcuterie or as the main wine with dinner. Our biggest problem is that we never go through enough reds. We rarely cook red meat and don’t do a great deal of red sauce pasta. Thus, over the last couple years, I’ve seriously overbought on reds and under bought on whites. I’ve reduced my red wine wine buying by about 1/2. We also aren’t the biggest chard fans so we do alot of white rhone or BDX white blends that hold up well against food. Also, we really do like rose. Great food wine.
Todd said something that perfectly reflects our situation - every wine we’ve drunk over the past week (and in most situations) was selected to go with our meal. We also happened to have a red sauce centric meal last night and went for a Vino Nobile.
Ok, Sangiovese may not be that rarified or geeky, so let’s instead call it Prugnolo Gentile like the Montepulcianios and note that it was a helluva nice match!
Oh, and we drink tons of Dolcetto. From the likes of Bartolo, Cappellano, Roagna, Anna Maria Abbona, Marcarini, etc etc. I think only less expensive Burgundy (red and white) and Cru Beaujolais make it to the table more often. And Muscadet in the warmer months.
Same here.
No kids and we eat a later leisurely dinner that takes about 45 minutes or hour and typically finish about 2/3 to 3/4 of a bottle.
What perplexes me are people who have no interest in whether the wine and food they consume together will destroy or complement each other yet obsess over the how the contours of the glass will affect their perception of the wine. ![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
My 2014 Consumption by Varietal (would be interested in what other folks did)
Pinot Noir 18.6%
Riesling 15.7%
Red Rhone Blend/Syrah 15.7%
Champagne Blend 14.3%
Chardonnay 8.6%
Mauzac 5.7%
One. ![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}
Top 10 for past year going back to December 12, 2013:
Red Burgundy/Pinot Noir 20.1% (includes some OR/Cali PNs)
White Burgundy/Chardonnay 14.3% (includes Chablis + several Arbois, Sonoma, Blanc de blancs)
Nebbiolo 11.6% (Barolo/Barb, yes, but also Gattinara, Carema, Langhe DOC, Coste della Sesia, Colline Novarese, etc.)
Riesling 8.5% (mostly German, mostly Mosel)
Gamay 7.3% (Morgon, Fleurie, MaV)
Chenin Blanc 5.0% (dry, demi, sweet, sparkling)
Dolcetto 5.0%
Melon de Bourgogne 5.0%
Sangiovese 4.6%
Palomino Fino 3.1% (mostly fino/manzanilla)
For 2014.
Chardonnay 18.1%
Cabernet Sauvignon 8.4%
Pinot Noir 7.6%
Syrah 5.2%
Zinfandel 4.8%
Red Bordeaux Blend 4.4%
Riesling 3.6%
Red Blend 3.6%
Red Rhone Blend 3.2%
Aglianico 2.4%
Gamay 2.4%
Sangiovese 2.0%
Tempranillo 1.6%
White Blend 1.6%
Merlot 1.6%
Champagne Blend 1.2%
Nerello Mascalese 1.2%
Grenache 1.2%
Barbera 1.2%
Carignan 1.2%
Sauvignon Blanc 1.2%
Sauvignonasse 0.8%
Seyval Blanc 0.8%
Mourvedre 0.8%
Petit Verdot 0.8%
Petite Sirah 0.8%
Vidal 0.8%
Viognier 0.8%
Viura 0.8%
Sagrantino 0.8%
Cabernet Franc 0.8%
Chenin Blanc 0.8%
Frappato 0.8%
Malvazia 0.8%
Mencía 0.8%
Montepulciano 0.4%
Palomino Fino 0.4%
Perricone 0.4%
Petit Manseng 0.4%
Melon de Bourgogne 0.4%
Furmint 0.4%
Grüner Veltliner 0.4%
Jacquère 0.4%
Malvasia Bianca 0.4%
Fiano 0.4%
Garganega 0.4%
Godello 0.4%
Greco 0.4%
Carricante 0.4%
Catarratto 0.4%
Albariño 0.4%
Arneis 0.4%
Assyrtiko 0.4%
Verdelho 0.4%
Xinomavro 0.4%
Nebbiolo 0.4%
Ribolla Gialla 0.4%
Port Blend 0.4%
SuperTuscan Blend 0.4%
Rkatsiteli 0.4%
Rosé Blend 0.4%
Roussanne 0.4%
For 2014, per CT:
15% pinot noir (half American, half French + German)
6.8% riesling
5.4% nebbiolo
5.4% “white blend” (mostly Loire, Alsace)
4.8% chardonnay (mostly Macon + Chablis, one Kalin, one Ceritas)
3.4% cab franc
3.4% gamay
3.4% “red blend” (Loire, Chile, Austria)
2.7% cab sauv (mostly due to outrageously good deal on 1996 Ardente)
2.7% vermentino
2.0% champagne blend
2.0% chenin blanc
2.0% melon de bourgogne
2.0% sangiovese
2.0% sauvignon blanc
2.0% semillon
2.0% syrah
2.0% tempranillo
2.0% verdicchio
(~27% = quite a few others)
I’ll give pairing some thought but I don’t perseverate on it. Almost always, I’ll just open something I know my guests like or think they’ll enjoy, no matter what food is served. I’m also equally likely to open a craft beer. Even a cocktail or whiskey is fair game.
Generally, I ask what guests feel like and will either open a bottle based on their answer, open a crowd pleaser if they’re not specific or noobs, or let them raid the bar.
the problem is that you’re treating the entire WB as some hivemind and conflating comments from dozens of different sources, and attributing them to one coherent behavior set.
For me, this is a topic that’s actually two sub-topics.
For a casual dinner during the week, or on the weekend with only my wife and I, dinners are simple and I grab a bottle that will generally go with the food without giving it too much thought. Seldom do we drink the wine while preparing the dinner, but consume it while eating. That’s a 20-30 minute event.
Completely different is the dinner party with friends that are wine aficionados and foodies. Those dinners are 5-6 courses plus an aperitif that go 4-5 hours. Each course has one or two wines carefully chosen to pair with the food. They will get served prior to the course coming out and usually last after the course is over to string together to the next course, but generally, the wine is consumed with the food over a period of 30 minutes for each course. Also, in these situations, I never drink wine while cooking, because I don’t need the distraction.
I think you can get pairing wrong (tannic red with spicy Tex-Mex or fish in butter sauce), but there’s usually a range of right answers, and synergistic pairings are kind of fun. I tend to use the Force and think about tannin, weight, and fruitiness. We mostly have wine with dinner, but with our toddler, dinner takes longer, not less time. We get zero uninterrupted minutes to eat, and our meal gets strung out along with the wine. For what it’s worth, our top mealtime wines are probably cool climate New World pinot, Italian sangiovese, Spanish tempranillo, and Bordeaux more or less in order - but Aussie grenache with chorizo burritos was really good, as was Cali chard with chicken tikka masala. This stuff is fun. Play with it.
You don’t usually put chocolate or rutabaga on your hamburger; why should wine be different? Yes, perhaps cocoa-dusted chopped steak or hamburger with rutabaga ketchup might be a great dish on the tasting menu and perhaps worth a shot when in that mood, but ketchup, mustard, maybe mayo, maybe Thousand Island work out just fine too. So I agree we overthink this, but I disagree that it doesn’t matter.
Neither I nor anyone else said that we hope that every response to a “what wine pairs with food X” thread is major wine categories like cabernet, chardonnay or pinot. I just wondered why that is almost never an answer, since that is the large majority of what most of us drink, presumably mostly around mealtime. I would have expected those discussions to have a combination of both types of answers, not to be almost exclusively super-obscure wines, rose, sparklers and Sherry.
And then all the “don’t drink wine with that, just drink beer” responses puzzle me as well; do that many of you seriously not drink wine whenever you’re eating something that isn’t down-the-middle European or wine country cuisine? When you’re having Korean BBQ or carne asada, you seriously can’t find a wine that goes pretty well with it?
It feels to me like there is some weird snob factor to declaring that drinking wine, or all but the more obscure wines, with many foods out there is an unsophisticated or foolish endeavor. And maybe that’s all it is.
Or maybe my assumptions are incorrect. There are a few proclamations in this thread about how someone really does mostly drink Assyrtiko, Verdicchio, Dolcetto and Bracchetto (Mauzac? What is that?), but I still feel pretty strongly that most WBers mostly drink the major categories of wine, and it’s just a minority who don’t do that who are posting their CT information in this thread.
Anyway, thanks for the lively discussion, it’s helped shed some partial light on an odd contour of the WB discussion experience. This place is as fun as ever.
You said it.
Chris,
If somebody would just request a pairing suggestion for scrambled eggs with lobster, I’d love to suggest buttery chardonnay.