I used to be very particular about food pairings. I would very often create recipes around the wine I wanted to drink or spend an inordinate amount of time trying to think of the perfect wine for a given meal or recipe.
I noticed that over the last couple of years, that’s mostly going away. I’m a lot more easy-going about what to drink and what to eat. It is what it is and I mostly enjoy it. I might just be getting more and more lazy but I like it. I still make a conscious decision as to what I feel like drinking with the meal but I won’t go out of my way to find the expected perfect match. Good looking bottle at the front of the wine fridge that doesn’t have me re-arranging bottles for 15 minutes, you’re it!
This might be a sign that this passion is evolving into a more laid-back state of mind. Or, I’m on a full-on regression and I’ll soon be drinking supermarket plonk. Who knows?
I’m with you, but I’ve just spent 35-45 minutes trying to figure out what to serve with a bottle of 2018 Knoll Riesling Smaragd Loibner tonight and I’m still undecided, so maybe it doesn’t work in reverse?
I have moved to Phase 3. In my cellar, I have about 30 clay tile slots specifically for bottles to be opened at any time without any thought. Lately, I’ve not been refilling the holes, so I may be sliding toward Phase 4.
(And now I’m thinking of “Phase IV” the 1974 sci-fi movie.)
We never drink wine with meals, and we hardly ever eat big meals in the evening. Wine is something for later, to be sipped standalone on the couch. No agonizing over pairings, anything goes, freedom. Phase infinity.
Basically all the wine I consume at home is with food, but I’ve never been finicky about wine/food pairings. Having worked for (way too many) years in a wine shop where customers would ask nonstop which wine would be the best pairing with whatever food imaginable, I’m pretty confident I can come up with all kinds of successful wine pairings possible.
However, when I make food at home and want to have some wine with it, I basically think: Is this a white or red wine dish? Does the wine need to be bigger or lighter and more acid-driven?
That’s about it. I don’t really care whether I grab a Pelaverga or Beaujolais; Furmint or Chenin; Bordeaux or Sagrantino. I just pick whatever I want to drink at that moment, no matter if some other similarly built would’ve been a more suitable choice. Trying to always find The Most Perfect Pairing Possible every single time strips the pleasure of drinking wine with food.
However, when we’re doing something bigger than just everyday dinner, for example we’re having guests or something along those lines. In these instances I try my best to find the perfect pairing with the food. Or even vice versa, if a wine is the centerpiece.
My only rule is to have an inverse proportionality between food complexity and wine complexity. If the focus is on a rich, sophisticated recipe, the wine will be simpler; if the meal is a pretext to check on how a particular bottle is doing, make sure the food is relatively unadorned and not too intrusive in its flavors.
I don’t fret over pairing with meals. I drink what I like. But damn, some classic pairings are a synergistic rhapsody; Champagne and caviar, Muscadet and oysters, Sauternes and foie gras, Nebbiolo and truffles, Vintage Port and Stilton cheese all come to mind.
I appreciate where everyone is coming from but I’m happy to be a differing voice here. Can pairing become overwrought and cumbersome? Of course. But I derive a lot of pleasure out of it, and do tend to give it a decent amount of thought whenever I’m eating any half decent meal.
Whenever I’m having wine with dinner, I treat it as an integral aspect to the meal- as if it’s an ingredient or a side dish. Taking this analogy admittedly a bit too far, just grabbing whatever wine with whatever meal is like having risotto as a main with shrimp cocktail and a scoop of ice cream as sides. All three are fine on their own, but there’s no synergy there, and lots of clash. We pair certain foods and use certain ingredients together for a reason, and I don’t think it should be different with wine. There’s plenty of latitude to play around, but why not try to pair things up as best as possible?
Most here are saying that they stay within a few general rules- and that’s enough to keep you out of risotto/shrimp cocktail/ice cream territory. And I think that’s true, but I enjoy the exercise of pairing, and judging by the number of threads about pairing on this board, many here do too. I sometimes find myself getting pairing-anxiety, paralyzed about how to proceed, but that’s rare.
I should qualify this by saying that I seriously got the wine bug just about 5 years ago, so I still might be in Phase 2. Who knows, in a few years I might be drinking red Bordeaux with salad, Aussie Shiraz with oysters, Chablis with chocolate cake, and loving it all.
I honestly rarely overthink these things. And I also guess that I am more of a wine guy than a foodie. I drink what I want to drink, when I want to drink it, and rarely with any planning whatsoever. So much of my life is planned and structured, or dictated by work, that this passion needs to be completely spontaneous for me. While I truly appreciate the benefits of pre-planning wines that you consume, especially those with maturity, standing them up for the appropriate amount of time and decanting and airing them as well for the appropriate amount of time, but truthfully, I so often just pop and pour whatever I want to pour. At that time. When it suits my fancy. And I am happy as a clam. My buddy @ToddFrench and I could not be any more different, other than the massive cannon (singular, I have a torn left bicep) and great hair.
I stopped overthinking it a little while ago, it’s more a question of what’s ready to drink and some basic guidelines (pinot with chicken or salmon, syrah/cab with red meat, Champagne with everything).
I don’t think anyone of us has reached this phase yet.
The point was that people don’t need to overthink what might be The Best Possible Pairing imaginable at the moment, but just a wine you’d like to drink and does the job perfectly well.
Meaning that if a perfect pairing for a certain dish would call for a Loire Chenin Blanc, I might grab a Riesling of similar sweetness just because I wanted to have a Riesling or that just was something in handy at the moment. And not, say, a Ribera del Duero because I wanted to have a Tempranillo with my… I don’t know, a slightly spicy and creamy chicken dish?
Haha yes of course. It was just a bit of a facetious remark on Phil’s Phase 4, which he defines as, “I drink whatever the hell I want, never mind the food.” Perhaps that’s the ultimate stage we can all strive for. I’ve got a long way to go…
Agree with both, my wife really has no rules and thanks to her a fatty steak with a high acid champagne was a shockingly good none traditional pairing. But you’re right the classics are classics for a reason.
I do think about pairing with every meal at which we are having wine. If I don’t already have a pairing in mind, I still refer to “What Tto Drink With What You Eat” by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page. I usually get some creative ideas from the book.
I know leg of lamb and Bordeaux is also considered a classic pairing, but my wife is not a big fan of lamb, so we substitute Roast Chicken and Bordeaux and it works quite well.
