Wine & Food Matching

My greatest passion as a Chef and as a diner is matching food with wine as it allows me to fully enhance the complete dining experience.  This is achieved simply by matching certain elements such as texture and flavour in both the food and wine.  Finding the right combination of these elements will interact with each other and your taste buds will enjoy the results. The most straightforward component of food and wine matching is to understand the balance between the "weight" of the food and the weight/body of the wine. What you want to achieve in matching wine and food is simple. You want to match the texture of the wine to the texture of the food.

Having a thorough wine knowledge certainly helped my steep learning curve as a chef progress at much greater rate as I understood the textures and flavors of both. Food simply tastes much better with wine as cuisine reaches their ultimate tasting heights. As a restaurateur and wine writer I learnt to understand wine varieties, how they taste, their textures, flavours, essences, aromas and as a chef what food they perfectly compliment. Every single dish ever cooked has its perfect wine match and will enhance both the wine varietal and the food to a new higher level of appreciation. Every time you serve a dish with wine you should be thinking about what would be the best possible wine match.

To achieve the best wine match it is necessary to analyze the basic components in both the wine and the food. The principal is to try and balance them so that neither the food nor the wine overpowers the other. The main elements of food and wine matching to consider are weight, flavour intensity and characteristics, acidity, salt, tannin, and sweetness. It is essential to remember the basic food and wine matching rules that lighter foods will always go well with lighter style wines and contrastingly richer food combinations will suit heavier styles of wine.

Here is my take on Wine & Food Matching