How to pair wine and food

This is one of those matters, where everything depends on personal taste. I’ve seen wine lovers who have matched a Barolo wine with fishplates and sparkling wine lovers who have matched a spumante with polenta (corn bread). However if you don’t have any preferences, there are some general rules, which should be respected. The wine should accentuate the plate without overshadowing or being overshadowed. In other words it should go well with the food and accentuate its positive characteristics or perhaps even abate the negative characteristics as is the case with royal weddings (…only those with a good outcome!) For example, a juicy plate requires a tannic wine (astringent) and alcoholic (cleansing), which abate the excess of oil. A plate rich in spices requires a very aromatic wine, which completes the aromas of the plate by enhancing it. A fresh wine goes especially well with plates rich in butter, whether sour or fizzy in order to abate the sensation of heaviness. The sweetness of the plate can be enhanced by the sweetness of the wine. The best match for delicate fish based hors d’oeuvres is a fresh young white wine, neither too fruity nor spicy, or even a sparkling one but this too should be young. With beef stew or even wild game, I recommend a very important red wine, with a good texture, which is able to compete with the strong aromas and flavours of the plate. A good choice of wine with cakes, pastries or even panettone is sweet wine, which further enhances the sweet sensation; it’s good to choose it with a high alcoholic structure. Very often, the Italian regional cuisine foresees historical matches, due to our grandfather’s good sense who in turn learned from experience all the great teachings, for example that Lambrusco wine goes well with eel. Red wine seems a countersense: in reality an excellent match with its freshness and fizziness abates the excessive fatty flavour of the eel. Therefore we should also be guided by the matches of our traditional cuisine. At this point, it’s natural to ask oneself, does wine go well with everything? Or are there certain plates, which should go well with wine? Indeed there are some plates that are extremely difficult to match, this is in function of the intrinsic characteristics that prevail and obfuscate wine, for example: raw artichokes, pickled vegetables, citrus fruits, ice-cream, fennel (finocchio) (it is for this reason that the term “infinocchiare” derives from finocchio, which was served by the dishonest host before decanting the wine!). However we have seen that hard to match foods, really have a suitable wine, chocolate for example goes well with Moscato di Scanzo. Therefore the general rule is: every food to its wine. This means that if our menu is articulate and foresees fish, meat and sweets, do we necessarily have to open three different bottles of wine? It would be ideal, but however not always possible (if there are only two people, then there’s the possibility that wine will be leftover or you might risk getting drunk!) So what do we do in these cases? By trying to find, with a little good sense, the right wine, which goes well with the main dish even if it’s not perfect with the others. However, if there are several dishes and the menu is very vast (…and we don’t have any limits in price!) we can reach optimality by matching a different wine with the right dish and by following the rule which requires wines that have a minor structure at the beginning and the more important ones towards the end (as should be the case with every dish). As said before: the matching of wine and food has a lot to do with personal taste, so if you wish to drink Brunello di Montalcino with sole…then do so!