Marin Magazine Blog

Conducting a Food and Wine Pairing at Home

February 5th, 2010 at 12:32pm Dan

[All information provided courtesy of Buena Vista Carneros Historic Tasting Room]

Set a date and invite your friends over! It doesn’t matter if they’re regular wine drinkers or not. If they like wine, they will love this experience.

On the day of or the day before:
Buy the food to go with the wine. All of the cheeses, olives and salami should be readily available at your local deli. The olives should be un-pitted, to ensure their freshness. The salami should be as fresh as possible and not too salty, not too lean and not too peppery. The foods are:
Lemon (a thin slice each slice)
Picholine green olives (3-4 per person)
Port Salute Cheese (3/4 ounce per person)
Goat Cheese (3/4 ounce per person)
Dubliner Cheese (3/4 ounce per person)
We like the Dubliner especially, but any hard, mild cheddar cheese will go great
Kalamata Olives (3-4 per person)
Salami (1 slice per person)

Set up your table and make up the plates of food. Included in this packet are six tasting mats and six food pairing sheets. The tasting mats have the wines written on them for ease of pouring and tasting. Pour the wine right as your guests sit down.

Start with a taste of the Chardonnay. Ask your friends if they thought it was acidic. Have them touch the lemon to their tongue. There is no need to bite into the lemon, unless they want to. Have them taste the Chardonnay again. They should notice that their perception of the acidity has greatly reduced. The wine should taste and feel much smoother and richer.  The reason this occurs is the chemistry (pH balance) of your mouth changes when you taste a high acid item, like lemon juice. Anyone can use this ‘trick’ just about anywhere. If you try a wine in a restaurant and it is far too acidic, just order an appetizer that has some kind of acid in it, like fried calamari or fish with lemon, or anything with capers. If you understand this, you have the power to make almost any wine match your food.

Then, have your guests take a small bite of the Picholine Green Olive and have another sip of the Chardonnay. Really, they just have to bite the very tip of it off to get the flavors and then it won’t overpower the wine. This gives some salt and fruit characteristics. This should bring out more of the fruit and savory flavors of the wine. In a restaurant, it would be like any dish or appetizer with olive oil, or pork loin (as well as green olives).

Now, we can start tasting the cheeses with the wines.  As you go through, remember you will get the most out of it if you taste the foods with the Chardonnay first and then move on to the Pinot Noir with each of the foods and so on. The order of tasting is the same as the order of the wines on the tasting mat, from left to right.

The Port Salute and Goat Cheeses go with all the wines, really, but we very much recommend the Port Salute with the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and the Goat Cheese with the Chardonnay, Syrah and Merlot. Both of these cheeses have a wonderful creaminess to them that mellows the acids and tannins of the wines. If you like the wine with these cheeses, you will probably like the wine with Cheese Stuffed Chicken or Crab and Cream Cheese Wontons.

The Dubliner Cheese has a slight tang to it, isn’t very fatty and has a great strong flavor that doesn’t overpower the wines. It goes best with the Pinot Noir and Syrah. If you like this cheese with the wine, you would probably like the wine with pasta dishes or veal parmesan with capers.

Next try the Kalamata Olives. As with the Green Olives, just take a small bite. They pack a lot of flavor and salt and you don’t want it to dull the taste of the wine. This should bring out the fruit flavors as well as reducing some of the tannins in the wines. We recommend this with all the red wines. If you like the Kalamata Olives with a specific wine, it will probably go with heavier, tomato sauce dishes or barbecue.

The last food pairing is the Salami. The salami brings salty, fatty, meaty tastes, coating the palette like the cheeses did. This will also bring out more of the bright fruit flavors of the heavier reds, like the Syrah and Merlot. This covers many beef and lamb dishes.

Combinations! Now that you’ve tried them individually (and if there is anything left) go ahead and mix them up. Put some goat cheese with some salami and Kalamata olives. We’ve found that to be one of the favorites. If you find a combination you really like, send us an email and let us know what it is! We could add it to the Carneros Room experience!

Buena Vista Historic Tasting Room
707-265.1472
18000 Old Winery Road
Sonoma, CA  95476
TastingRoom@BuenaVistaCarneros.com, WineClub@BuenaVistaCarneros.com

Entry Filed under: Food