Pairings: Not Just for Mentors and Mentees Anymore

If you're anything like me, you probably like a lot of things. You probably like food-many types of food. You probably like wine-many types of wine. It might not be such a far-fetched assumption to guess you like drinking different types of wine with different types of food. But here's when it gets tricky, right? I mean, everyone knows you're not supposed to pair fish with red wine. And everyone knows that you're not supposed to pair steak with white wine.

Right. And these same people will say that you should never put a chill on a bottle of red.

I'm not saying you can pair with impunity. Like pairing mentors with mentees, or belts with shoes, some careful thought and reflection is useful.

A good place to start is the default rule: reds with red meat like steak and lamb, whites with white meats like fish and poultry. Another default rule is matching weights-that is, lighter-bodied wine with lighter foods and sauces, and fuller-bodied wine with heavier foods and sauces. Combining these rules will get you through most every pairing requirement.

For instance, are you going to have a steak? A traditional pairing is steak with Cabernet Sauvignon. Unfortunately, I am a strong believer that good Cabernet is hard to find cheap-or young. Fortunately, you could go to Trader Joe's and pick up a bottle of Washington State's Chateau Ste. Michelle Cabernet Sauvignon for about $15: it's young, yes, but it's well-made and its tannins are not overpowering. I would actually recommend you forego Cabernet until you're a real lawyer (sometime in 2015?) and look to Argentinean Malbec or perhaps Australian Shiraz to eat with your ribeye.

Will you be having tilapia? Chances are that you'll be spending more on wine than on the main course (heh heh), but almost any white wine will fit the bill. Tilapia and other white fishes are pretty mild in flavor, so chances are you'll want to pair the wine with the sauce or marinade. Is the sauce going to be a heavy butter-based sauce? You could either go to complement the sauce with something rich and full like a Chardonnay, or provide a contrast with something lean and light like a Sauvignon Blanc.

But what about salmon? It's a rich, fatty, and reddish fish. You could serve it with a white wine, but it also pairs extremely well with Pinot Noir. The basic MacMurray Ranch Sonoma Pinot Noir (around $18) is a good bet, or you could get a bottle of the St. Innocent "Seven Springs" Pinot from the Willamette Valley of Oregon for substantially more. Pork-and chicken-swings both ways, too.

Beyond the basic default rules of color and weight, you could also apply two balancing tests. The first is the balance between acid and tannin; the second is the balance between sweet and dry. These tests are especially useful when, as mentioned above, you are determining whether you want the wine to complement or contrast with your food.

These introduce many other wines to the mix. Thus, a nice dry Riesling would go well with the tilapia in butter sauce. It would also go well with tilapia in a Thai-style glaze. It really depends on whether you want a complement or a contrast. Going back to the steak, you could go with the Cab if you want a full wine whose tannins would accent the char. Or, you could go with a Chianti, which is much more acidic and less tannic than Cabernet, if you wanted to "cut through" the fattiness of the steak.

Chianti would also go well with a nice marinara sauce, which brings up another principle: pair wines with the foods from the same region. Italian Chianti (made from the Sangiovese grape) goes supremely well with tomato sauce and many other Italian foods; Austrian Grüner Veltliner, which is a crisp dry white wine, not so coincidentally goes well with Wiener Schnitzel. Try the Velt.1 Grüner which you can pick up at Whole Foods for around $10 or $11.

The final considerations are, well, the equivalent of judicial gloss: they are the individual and often quirky characteristics of different varietals. Grüner is described as having a peppery bite near the finish, which explains why it goes well with not only Weiner Schnitzel but fried chicken. Malbec often has dark chocolate notes, which means you can serve it with steak and finish the rest off with dessert. If you're cooking Hungarian paprika chicken, you could go with a white wine to cut through the richness of the sour cream, or you could go with Jean-Luc Matha's wine from the Marcillac region of France, made from the Mansois grape, which ends with a mouthful of-you guessed it-paprika.

In the end, much of the fun is thinking up creative pairings; it's trial and error at its best. Of course, if you really can't think up a pairing, there is a way out, an equitable remedy of sorts.

That remedy? Beer.