Wine and Food Pairing
We have just completed a very successful Courtyard at the 2025 OC Fair that included more than a dozen wine seminars, many of which were structured to explain and illustrate the art of wine and food pairing. Our members leading the seminars paired wine with fair food, BBQ, snack food and cheese. Sparkling wine was paired with sweets and grapes with grains. The pairings all sounded like fun and it can’t be that difficult, matching wines with different foods, can it? Oh yes it can and congrats to our members who successfully developed and led the seminars, because wine and food pairing, something that has been going on for centuries, is not an easy task.
Given that from the beginning of time, food and wine were consumed together and there was probably no attention given to matching the food with the wine or the wine with the food. What local food and wine you had was what you consumed. But in essence this was pairing. One of the many approaches to food and wine pairing today is regional/geographic proximity of the items paired. An actual concerted effort to pair food and wine started in Europe when taverns and inns evolved into restaurants. The origin of the word restaurant comes from the French word, “restaurer,” which loosely translates to “provide food for.” It was during this development of restaurants, with the increased use of tableclothes, plates, knives, forks, spoons and glasses, that the basic concepts of drinking red wine with meat, white wine with fish and fowl and sweet wine with dessert were adopted. Pairing had begun.
Wine and food pairing began in Europe with the epicenter being France. In fact, the historical relevance of the French structured meal matching food and wine is so important that in 2010 UNESCO added, “The gastronomical meal of the French – the art of the pairing of food with wine” to its Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage. It was during the 1920s and 1930s that the matching of culinary dishes with wine started to become a science, as well as an art. Numerous culinary, scientific, geographic and historical books were being written. Even though many of the pairings of the Middle Ages had some medicinal basis, the new “rules” for pairing were changing all of that.
But it really wasn’t until the 1980s that interest in food and wine pairing increased in the United States. Restaurants started to promote wine dinners, food magazines suggested pairings and wineries were making culinary suggestions on their wine bottle labels.
What, however, are the “rules” or proposed suggestions to pair food and wine? When you look for help to answer that question there is no shortage of expert advice. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some suggestions that I found when looking into this subject:
Some of the above you will notice are still the pairing suggestions of old. But as is so often true, there is no stopping creativity even when trying to pair the right wine with the right food. New pairing suggestions have been developed using scientific/chemical analysis to build molecular flavor harmony. Krug Champagne has added specially composed music to the equation in an effort to create harmonious pairings. Specific bottles of Krug Champagne Grande Cuvee have a code that allows you to hear the paired music. And when all else fails check with Artificial Intelligence. The wine “paired” with prime ribs of beef – full bodied red with high tannin such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Malbec or a Bordeau blend; and for filet of sole cooked in butter, lemon and herbs – a light crisps white wine such as Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio or a dry, unoaked Chardonnay like Chablis. Not bad pairings but even AI uses the old rules – red with meat and white with fish.
However, to paraphrase Tim Hanni, a Master of Wine, the diner’s taste preferences should be matched to the wine not the food. And I agree. I often say my favorite wine is the one in my glass. When it comes to wine and food pairing, experiencing as many different pairings as we could with the wine seminars is fun and educational and a good basis to build on. We can each choose a wine to pair with our meal. Will it always be a perfect or even good pairing, perhaps not. But when you find a wine you like, open it, and if it pairs well, so much the better. Just enjoy it. Cheers!
–C.L. Keedy, Wine Education Committee