The Best Way to Match Food and Wine

Have you ever experienced the gorgeous marriage of flavours that can result from perfectly matched food and wine? Sometimes it happens more by accident than design, but get the combination right once and the effect can be so sublime it spurs you to seek it out with other foods.

The easiest demonstration of how amazing good wine and food combinations can be comes from scoffing creamy blue cheese with a Sauternes dessert wine. The sweetness of the wine blends perfectly with the sharp tang of cheese to make a more decadent, creamy mouthful.

Or try a bold, tannic Bordeaux red wine with some grilled, well seasoned beef. For many Brits, French reds come across too dry and tannic, but the salt in beef tames those tannins and transforms the wine into an altogether rounder, softer drink.

Recent research from Mintel shows in-home drinking has grown 17{f19aa3268e0de58f68955454d58a1a58d35e804fdb04b2f57dd6dc7aad4ec259} since 2006 as the recession forces us to entertain more at home. Wine now tops the list of alcoholic drinks consumed at home – 44{f19aa3268e0de58f68955454d58a1a58d35e804fdb04b2f57dd6dc7aad4ec259} of us drink it with a meal, five percent more than those who choose beer.

But where is the guidance pointing me to something to cook with a particular bottle of New Zealand Chardonnay I adore? I don’t want anything vague here – if I am going to inflict my choice on friends I need a special recipe that has been proven to work. I need a resource pointing me to tried and tested combinations.

Last Sunday my wife presented me the challenge of finding a wine to drink with a vegetarian curry. There’s an old joke about curry – what’s the best wine to match with it? Answer – beer. But the wife prefers wine, so I bought a bottle of Dr Wagner’s Riesling from Waitrose for £8.54 and it was a joy to see the look of delight on her face when we tasted it with the dish.

The reason medium-dry Riesling goes so well with curry? It’s lower in alcohol (this one was just 8{f19aa3268e0de58f68955454d58a1a58d35e804fdb04b2f57dd6dc7aad4ec259}) which neatly avoids turning up the heat in the spices to intolerable furnace levels, but even though it’s sweet there is still a refreshing acidity. The ‘wow’ moment came when noticing how the curry amplified the fruit flavours in the wine, making it taste so much better with the food.

The experience inspired me to start a blog presenting the recipes and bottle combinations that work for me. I can’t promise to fill it up very quickly (there’s a limit to how fast I can cook, eat and drink), but it’s a start – until TV and publishers discover and start to promote a celebrity sommelier.

Follow my adventures matching food and wine at http://www.winewithfood.com. I can’t promise to eat faster than the average person, but as I begin to discover really good food and wine matches I will post them there.