Cricket Hill Wine with Food

Exposing the myth

Contrary to those “experts” who mysteriously divine certain foods “match perfectly” with a certain wine, it is often more difficult to mismatch a wine-food combination than it is to find some magical pairing. If you start with the notion that every wine can go with every food, you’ll be right far more often than wrong – the saving grace of many “expert” recommendations.

Wine-Food Pairing Guidelines

That isn’t to say that there are no “better” wine-food pairings, but like anything, doing it correctly means knowing a few rules and doing a bit of homework. Here are the few basic guidelines that will serve you well and make your wine-food pairings stand out from the norm.

The goal here is to reveal how it’s done so you can get over the fear of making mistakes and recognize poor from good wine-food pairing advice – whatever the source. It’s far more rewarding to create your own pairings than to continuously searching for what may often be sub-standard advice on “perfect matches.”

To start, it’s essential to recognize that both wines and foods will taste different depending on how they’re prepared. Your lasagna has a pinch of sugar to cut its acid while Aunt Louise make hers without – they taste different. The same with the best wines. The Claret from Cricket Hill will be different from the Claret at XYZ winery. So telling someone that a “Chilean Malbec pairs perfectly with Lasagna” is just plain silly. It’s the particular wine and the particular food that create the match.

So here are the basic rules to begin your wine-food matching education.

1) Know the wine — taste it before you serve it at your important dinner party. Buy wine two bottles at a time so you will have one to try and one to serve when it counts – don’t rely on some “expert’s” assertion that some varietal will work fine with the dish you’re serving — it’s often no better than a shot in the dark. Taste! Taste! Taste!

2) Know the food — “experts” focus far too much attention on the wine. Like the wine you need to taste the dish to know its flavor components and ALWAYS match the wine to the sauce. The French say Le sauce c’est tout – the sauce is everything. The fact is, the process of pairing wine with food is much like what a chef goes through when determining what sauces compliment certain foods so pay special attention to its multiple flavor components as you select the wine. For foods without sauces, remember, it’s the particular recipe and how it is prepared that makes the match!

3) Match dominant flavors — or at least easily recognizable flavors. Fine wines will have multiple flavors to choose from. When you know the wine and know the food you can find that common thread that will “make them go together.” Guests will often enjoy the experience of “discovering” the flavor component match you’ve made.

4) Acidity is your friend — Acidity is confusing to people. Few properly understand its flavor in wine and often incorrectly mistake astringency, bitterness, or tannins for acidity. Forget chemistry, in wines, acidity is generally perceived as tart (in reds) or crisp (in whites) while in foods it is easily described by eating a raw tomato or apple. A good test for wine acidity is to try the wine with a cream sauce or rich food that may include clarified butter. If the wine cuts through the heavy sauce flavor and “resets your palate” it would qualify as high in acids. Acid is a necessity for wines paired with rich, buttery or creamy foods.

5) Don’t over (or under) power — don’t overpower either the food with the wine or vice versa. If one or the other is subtle in flavor, and we’re not speaking of bland or lacking in flavor, the word subtle is not the same as missing — you need to pair it with an equally subtle partner. Some of the world’s finest wines fall into the category of subtle in flavors and of course, certain ageable wines will drop their youthful exuberance in favor of the much sought mature flavor profile age can bring.

Those few basics will get you well on your way to wine-food pairings that stand out. Removing the fear many advice givers have generated by making wine-food pairing into a mysterious endeavor that only they can fathom, one fraught with perilous missteps and blunders requiring their continued advice to navigate. Wine and food are there for us to enjoy, not to fear!

Now you have the basics - but like any skill there are levels beyond the basics. The best next step article we’ve ever found to help with wine food pairing was written by Ray Isle in Food & Wine Magazine. We heartily recommend it.

Food Friendly Tasting Notes

In the context above, here are some food friendly tasting notes to help you with pairing current Cricket Hill wines.

It’s the particular wine and the particular food that create the match.

wine and food

Cabernet Franc

Upcoming Release

Subtle Flavors

Adequate acids for grilled fish to cheese dishes

Broad spectrum coverage of subtly flavored dishes

Example - goat cheese quiche

Nothing Subtle, multitude of flavors

Unctuous – prefers its acids in the food

Enjoyable alone or pair with food

Example – Mélange Vegetal avec Petit Pain

Flavors galore, not subtle

Balanced acid - accommodates widest range of food acids except extremes

Example - (contact us for the particular recipe)

Red berry dominant, not delicate

Tart is my middle name

Demands simple, sweet, creamy foods

Example - (contact us for the particular recipe)

To purchase Cricket Hill wines, call (541) 899-7264 or visit us at the winery — our owners personally host every guest so it is definitely worth the effort.