Wednesday, March 15, 2017

It's All About That Body

Is your wine tasteless?  Have you noticed that you've had a sip of something fantastic and then you eat a little something and all of a sudden that awesome wine has no flavor at all?  It may be a simple fix- it might be that the wine was simply paired poorly.  One of the biggest errors that you can make when pairing wine with your food is not taking the body of the wine into consideration. 

Body of wine however doesn't refer to waist measurements or how it looks in those jeans- instead it refers to how it feels in the imbibers mouth.  We have a little analogy to help make sense of this.  Skim milk- you know how that feels when you drink it?  Weightless right?  Sort of like water?  But then if you were to drink heavy cream, or maybe when your ice cream melts in the summer- you know how that feels in your mouth?  It coats your teeth and tongue.  It lingers on the surfaces.  Wine will do the same- a light bodied wine washes back like skim milk, and a full bodied wine lingers like heavy cream.  And just like there are gradients between milk types- 1%, 2%, Whole...there are with wine as well.  Every wine will feel different in your mouth.

Apparently I have no photos of Beef Stew...imagination
Now with that much intricacy- that means that you can't just pair any old food with every glass of wine.  That's recipe for disaster.  Lets say you have a light bodied Sauvignon Blanc and you decided to pair that with beef stew.  Beef stew is full of richness.  The beef is fatty and the broth is hearty.  That will coat your mouth all on its own.  Now when you take a sip of that delicate Sauvignon Blanc, well it just can't compete.  It's own body is so light that it is overwhelmed by the richness of the stew and you no longer taste any of its flavor.  Poor Sauvignon Blanc.   Let's say, instead, that we pair that Sauvignon Blanc with roasted chicken or sushi?  Now every flavor of that Sauvignon Blanc can be relished, and so can your food!

That's of course the other side- if your wine is too full bodied, let's look at a Cabernet Sauvignon from Napa, then your food gets overshadowed.  That fresh Lobster Roll you've been dreaming about all winter.  It's finally in front of you- lightly dressed with butter, but really the lobster is the star, and then you pair it with a big Cab.  Yikes- good bye lobster- your layers of flavor will have to be tasted a different day.

Of course I'm speaking in extremes, but we want to be careful of the body of wine when we're pairing with food.  Make sure that the body of your food matches (as closely as you can) the body of your wine and avoid the unpleasantness.  

Restaurant Reviews: A dead art?

Last December I declared 2023 the year I would return to food writing.  It was a bold statement (even now as I look at my last published dat...