Italian Wine Food Matching

Italian wine has always been produced as an accompaniment to food. Wine for wines sake, wine that is simply to be enjoyed solo is a relatively new phenomenon and through the ages wine production, producing the perfect wine, has been the quest to create the perfect food/wine match.

Wine variance through the regions of Italy is directly related to the regional foods. It is no happy accident that the wines of Italy have a high acidity content. The Italian diet consisted of fish, tomatoes, olive oil and condiments such a vinegar and lemons were used to cut through that fatty/oily diet with acid. If drinking wine, then acidic wines were called for, Valpolicella, Dolcetto and Chianti being good examples.

Oily foods, fish etc, need to be cut with a sharpness that Italian wines can provide. Normally we would seek to pair fish with a white wine, but some Italian reds can also do the job. Today we are going to look at Food/Wine matches to make, and most importantly, food/wine matches to avoid. These recommendations are not cast in stone, just like wine itself, food/wine pairings are down to individual taste. I can't imagine many enjoying the metallic taste you're left with when you pair a tannic bordeaux with oily fish but, if you had braces as a child, perhaps it will give you immense pleasure recalling your childhood.

There are very few perfect matches, so never worry about finding the perfect food/wine match. There are however, some basic principles that should help you never make a bad choice when ordering wine for food.

The Theory Test

When matching food and wine all you need to do is take into consideration some easy to grasp basic principles. When you have these etched on your brain, the worry over what wine to buy for a family event or special meal will melt away like the butter in a saucepan.

1) Chewy foods go with chewy tannins. So your powerful Cabernets and a tannic Merlot would be a loving partner for steaks, beefburgers, a roast meal, a beef stew, really any dark meats.

2) Fatty and oily foods go with acidic wines. As I mentioned, if you don't want to take a white wine that is the traditional pairing then you can take an acidic Italian red. Valpolicella, Dolcetto, Chianti will all do this job. The white wines of Alsace and Riesling are a more traditional pairing.

3) Salty foods match sweet or highly acidic wines. A salty chicken soup will match up with an acidic wine, like a Chianti or a sweet wine, like Lambrusco.

4) Either match the flavour profile or contrast the flavour profile. If you've tasted a wine before and thought, "wow, that's just like oranges" then you can match it with duck l'orange for example. If you think a wine has a contrasting flavour to a food; that can work too. Try things, think about the characteristics of the wine, the weight, the acidity, richness and intensity and then think about the meal. Does it share these qualities? If so, it probably goes well. If it's the opposite, it probably goes well. If it's a hit and miss kind of thing, it'll probably bomb.

5) The quick match tick list. If all that seems too much to remember then just go with the quick match tick list. Match all these characteristics to the wine.

• Weight - heavy meals=heavy wines or light and airy foods=light wine
• Acidity - high acidity food=high acidity wine
• Sweetness - sweet food=sweet wine
• Richness - rich food=rich wine
• Flavour Intensity - strong flavours in the food=strong flavoured wine

Cheese
Cheese gets its own little subsection. Everybody loves wine and cheese they are perfect together, they are the Laurel and Hardy of food/drink combinations but even this perfect pair can go horribly wrong. Lets take some basic Italian cheese and match them up.

Parmigiano/Romano/Padova - Barbera, Barolo, Barbaresco, Brunello, Chianti and a Super Tuscan
Gorgonzola and Blue Cheeses- Valpolicella, Amarone
Goats Cheese and Soft Cheeses - Sauvignon Blanc, the Northern whites.


Food and Wine Pairings from Hell

1) Tannic wines and fish - metallic and nasty, a complete no-no.
2) Subtle wines and Spicy foods - Curries or Chinese foods with lowly flavoured wines.
3) Meaty and heavy dishes with light wines - Steak and Champagne for example.

Dream matches, like white truffles and Barolo, are few and far between. Keep experimenting and maybe you will come up with your own personal dream matches. If you do, don't forget to tell me all about them.

Question of the Day
Share your food matches from heaven and your food matching mistakes.

Italian Wine Consortium

The Italian Wine world is composed of thousands of individual winemakers. 60,000 producers squeeze out 50 million hectolitres of wine each year and compete against one another to create the best Barolo, Brunello, etc etc.

This is wonderful for us, the consumer, we have a seemingly infinite choice of wines all striving for supreme quality which is what makes the Italian wine world so interesting to me. However, this is not how the rest of the world operates. In the States there are massive wine consortium's who buy up producer after producer and standardise and regulate and do such awful sanitary things that decrease my enjoyment of the wine but also, and this is the killer blow, decrease the price of the bottles. What they achieve is excellent QPR.

When I buy a bottle of wine I don't simply think about the price, my key criteria is not always even the taste, but when I buy wine I'm buying into the whole story. I want to know everything, about the grape, the conditions at the vineyard, the vintage, the producer, I am buying into the life of the wine. It's a romantic, old fashioned notion, and I am in a vast minority.

Price is what matters today. With wines from all over the world becomingly increasingly available the Italian market can not even rely on the loyalty of Italian wine drinkers anymore. Top quality wines, hand picked grapes, low yields are exceptionally expensive and this cost is passed onto the consumer. Young Italians aren't interested in the tradition or the story of the wine. They want quality wines yes, but with a jazzy label. Braida and Planeta are doing their utmost to embrace the young Italian wine drinker with cool commercials and hip marketing and are carving out a niche for themselves with the wealthy younger generation (consider a bottle of Planeta/Braida is still usually over €15)

This is a step in the right direction by Braida and Planeta but much much more needs to change. Italian wine makers need desperately to set up consortia in order to promote their wines at home and abroad. The New World is going to bite us in the ass. Not by the quality of their wine as was feared but their ability to market their products and face marketing costs together.

Take for example Chile, a hugely successful emerging wine country has only 130 producers creating some 10 million hectolitres of wine. Another example is Australia, 300 of their producers account for 75% of their total export.

Italian wine is the worlds leading importer of wine into the States but nowhere near enough is being done to fend off the New World attack. Personally I hope the Italian wine producers can strike some kind of balance. I don't want to see huge Italian wine consortium's and have an unavoidable decrease in quality with a higher importance placed on the brand yet I don't want the smaller producers to disappear unable to sell their expensive wines and unable to compete with their marketing. We're in a time of change and can't rely on the simple fact the wine is "Italian" with all the romantic notions attached to that label.

Of course none of us can tell what is going to happen in the next 5 years, whether Italy will lose its US wine drinkers crown to Australia or if we will see many smaller Italian wine makers going bust but, it looks inevitable from where I stand today. The powers that be have a chance to change the future for Italian wine and Italy's answer to Yellowtail is still up for grabs. As for me, I'll continue to support our smaller producers making some of the best quality wines in the world. Perhaps the Slow Food group should help tackle this growing problem and create a Slow Wine section to protect the threat to quality we are facing today.

Question of the day?
What criteria influence your decision to buy wine?