Why just drink wine when you can really know wine?

Wine and Food Pairing Dinners Hosted by Ned Towle
Tasting, Enjoying, and Learning about Food and Wine Matches

Matching Wine and Food

Wines taste best with food, but which wines with which dishes? Behind the marriage of luscious dishes and  harmonious wines, lies a smorgasbord of ideas about food and wine pairing. There are the very laid-back theories - “If it’s a kind of food you like and a wine you enjoy, go for it!”, or “It’s not so much the wine and the food as the company and the occasion that matters.” There is truth in both these perspectives, but most of us would not enjoy matching a sweet cake with a dry white or a high alcohol red with a hot (spicy) dish, no matter how much you liked the wine separate from the food or the people you were with!

Other theories emphasize matching wines and foods from the same region. This works spectacularly at times, such as in the pairing of the Loire Valley’s Crottin Chavignol goat cheese with the local Sancerre Sauvignon Blanc. However, when looking for the best cheese match for Portugal’s Port, most gourmets go across the sea to England for its stilton cheese, rather than pick a local Portuguese cheese. Nevertheless, the local wine and food customs should not be ignored as they often point to good matches.

Many writers on food and wine look to mirror or balance the flavor and “weight” (body, intensity and persistence of flavors) of the food and wines: i.e. they would suggest you forego your favorite tannic, oaky, block buster red when ordering the delicate, sautéed filet of sole.  But even balancing flavors and weight may not succeed if the food is dominated by spicy or acidic, bitter, sweet, or umami tastes. When one or more of these tastes dominate they will heighten disagreeably the bitterness, dryness, astringency, and acidity of wines, particularly those wines already high in these tastes.  

These perspectives on food and wine matches will be helpful in developing some simple guidelines.  The fun part is getting to the actual tasting of wines and food, where no doubt we will discover that our palates and preferences differ, and where some of the guidelines are more useful than others.

Five courses are prepared by the Executive Chef of the Hilton Rye Town. Six to eight wines will be paired each evening. The Executive Chef will be available to discuss the preparation of the dishes and, with Ned Towle, the choice of wines.