Food pairing is a journey to discover taste. My advice is to build a personal database, a series of tasting notes you keep in a book or in your memory, ready to use when choosing a wine at the restaurant or comparing it against others.
Building your own experience
Why keep tasting notes
Experience, the notes you collect, and the different tastes of different wines let you form real judgments and explain them. With culture, sensitivity and experience you can choose the right wine at the right moment, comment on it, and tell your guests about it.
Pairing food and wine has never had this much attention on the world stage. The journey to discover taste is long and demanding — just think of the 70,000 traditional Italian recipes. Choosing the right wine to match what is served at the table becomes a fairly complex operation.
Matching flavors
How to choose the right wine
My advice, to keep things simple, is to work out the components of the food's flavor first and then choose the wine to match. Think about whether the dish is sweet, bitter, salty, sour, spicy and so on. What matters is identifying the stable, dominant flavors, then choosing a wine that enhances or softens similar or opposite components. The balance between food and wine is the goal.
A delicate dish takes a soft wine.
A dish with strong flavors needs a full-bodied wine with an important taste. After each mouthful of the same food, the taste buds send weaker signals to the brain, so the food loses its taste and you appreciate it less.
Wine matters a great deal at this stage, because it cleans the mouth completely of the food's flavors, so every bite tastes as good as the first.
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