How to match red wine to food
The combination of food and wine: a journey to discovering taste.
It happens very often that either at the restaurant or at home, sometimes we find ourselves struggling with the choice of wine to match food.
My advice is to build your own personal database, consisting of a series of tasting cards that we will use in our personal book or imprinted in our memory and will use wine selection in the restaurant or compare it with other wines.
Experience, collections, and various tastings of different wines will allow you to give judgments, motivating them, about wine.
You will be with culture, sensibility, experience to choose the right wine at the right time, comment on it and tell it to your guests.
Never as today the consideration of the wine food combination has never been on the world stage.
The journey to discovering taste is a long and challenging journey, just think of the 70,000 traditional Italian recipes.
Thus, choosing the right wine to match the food served at the table becomes a fairly complex operation.
My advice, to simplify and things, is to taste, understand the components of the flavor of that food to choose the right wine to match.
Let’s reflect on whether the food is sweet, bitter, salty, acidic, spicy etc .. The important is the dominant flavors and choose the wine that enhances or attenuates similar or opposite components of the wine served. The balance between food and wine is the end result.
A delicious dish wants a tiny wine.
A dish with strong flavors needs big, important wines.
After each bite of the same food, the taste buds send less powerful signals to the brain, so the food loses its flavor and we appreciate it less.
Wine is very important at this stage because it completely cleanses the mouth from the flavors of the food and every bite is as good as the first one.
How to Match Red Wines to Red Meat
The first thing we have to do is choose the wine according to the cooking of the meat.
If we have a flesh in the blood, like the Fiorentina steak or tartar, we have to choose a young wine, such as Chianti.
If we have a very cooked meat, such as braised or boiled, we have to choose an aged wine such as a Chianti Classico or a Rosso di Montalcino.
If the red meat is a little greasy, like the boar, the ribs, we need a full and substantial red wine, such as Brunello di Montalcino, Rosso di Toscana Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.
How to Match Red Wines with White Meats
It is difficult to suggest a red wine to match white meats but in fact you can safely recommend it though, it is more common to combine red meat with red wine.
A roast veal is very well matched with a Cabernet Sauvignon.
Even a beautiful grilled white meat such as chicken, hare, rabbit and turkey can be combined with a lighter red wine such as a Lambrusco or a Rosso di Montepulciano.
How to Match Red Wines with Fish
Here we are faced with an awkward choice, but certainly not to be abandoned.
We have to decide what kind of fish and its cooking and seasoning.
Fish cooked in tomato sauce must be combined with young red wines and also fresh.
For livestock trunks, tomato sauce, carrots with gravy, wines like Chianti and Chianti Classico are to be combined.
How to Match Red Wines with Cheese
Great is the combination of Red Wine and Cheese but here we have to be aware of the type of cheese and its seasonality, its flavors and the intensity of the perfumes.
It is advisable to combine a seasoned cheese with a full bodied, aged and alcoholic red wine such as Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon Rosso Toscano.
While we have a fresh cheese, such as pecorino, the red wine to match must be light to maintain the balance between the flavors and here we suggest to combine sweet and delicate wines.
Author
Luciana Cilemmi
Luciana Cilemmi, deals with Magazine, Style Director and Co-founder of Tenuta Torciano winery and Tenute Giachi wines and the innovative Viviarium Restaurant of Bottega Torciano- Tenuta Torciano & Winery is part of an international reality that is born in Italy by an initiative of Pierluigi Giachi and Luciana Cilemmi, who have worked for years in the Italian wine market , expanding throughout in the United States, managed and controlled by the american company ' Bellavini winery. Luciana Cilemmi was born in San Gimignano to a family of artists specialised in the restoration of medieval buildings. Having completed her technical studies, she now pursues the interests passed on to her by her family, like her passion for artistic objects, in particular works of art created in Tuscany between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But she reserves her keenest enthusiasm for the historic works completed in San Gimignano between 1100 and 1300. Alongside her love of medieval history, she is fascinated in wines produced from Tuscan vineyards, which, together with saffron and wool, were the most sought-after goods traded by the wealthy noble families of San Gimignano already in medieval times. Luciana Cilemmi left San Gimignano at the age of 21 and embarked on a pilgrimage in search of knowledge and to discover the new winemaking skills and products that were then developing both in Italy and in France. In the meantime she added to her knowledge of wine by attending specialised courses and becoming a master of wine. On returning to Siena, she discovered a wonderful area near Murlo where she fell in love with the tiny, unspoilt village of Montepescini. She bought the estate of Montepescini where, based on the experience she had acquired over the years, she found a particular lie of the land, special climatic conditions and an altitude suited to the creation of great wines. With enormous enthusiasm, doggedness and considerable effort, a reclamation programme was started to renew the terrain which was then used to plant 30 hectares of specialised vines. Sangiovese is the dominant vine, followed by Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Syrah. Years of experimentation and the introduction of new winemaking techniques eventually led to the creation of Luciana di Memmi’s prestigious wines. Some years ago, Luciana Cilemmi succeeded in realising her dream of a lifetime: to return to her home town, San Gimignano. She was destined to buy the historic palace with the medieval tower, which had been owned by the prestigious Useppi family from 1200 to 1927 and had then passed to the noble and historic Chigi family of Siena. The Useppi were a powerful Sienese family who owned several castles. This beautiful medieval building has an elegant and distinctive façade full of Sienese and Pisan architectural influences. If you find yourself in San Gimignano, make sure you visit the Chigi Tower and Palace. Luciana Cilemmi holds regular events in the rooms of the medieval tower, such as the presentation of wines, both from her vineyards and elsewhere, attended by international journalists, experts from the sector and critics. She also organises exhibitions of works of art and paintings, and press conferences on the subject of "Wine in San Gimignano during medieval times”. Visiting the home of Luciana Cilemmi is like re-living an aspect of the past that will not return except through the imagination of those who have believed and continue to believe in this story.
