Do you plan ahead for your festive meals, celebrations and get-togethers with respect to what beverages to serve or do you just wing it?
If you are more the planner, remember this when pairing wine with meals, appetizers or whatever. Instead of thinking red wine with red meat, white wine with white meat and seafood, and what about vegetarian or those cheesy appetizers?
Change your focus from the old red with red, white with white etc. Instead think more of the sauces being served with the courses, and the spices being prominent with them all. For example if you were serving an asian type of chicken dish, your typical white wine would be horrid. Asian spices need something sweet to offset the heat and intensity of the typical spices. If you don't, the Chardonnay will taste horrible and the meal will as well. Asian spices must be served with sweeter or "off-dry" varietals and blends like Reisling, or Gewurztraminer. These will mitigate the "heat" of asian and even mexican type spices. The possibilities are many.
Vegetarian dishes do well with a variety of wines, both read and white as well as sparkling wines. Again, think in terms of what spices will be prominent in your vegetarian dishes. And don't overlook the resurgence of rosés from all over the world.
Bleu cheese with those appetizers? Another sweeter wine will offset the saltiness of the bleu cheese and make both taste wonderful.
Finally--sparkling wines from all over the world are inexpensive and pair well with
"almost" anything. Just avoid the highly advertised wines like "Barefoot" and a myriad bunch you only see advertised this time of year. For just $2-5 more a bottle you can get "real" wine that has some character and will enhance your hard preparations.
If in doubt, shoot me a question!
No comments:
Post a Comment