A Simple Trick for Choosing a Wine Match for Your Recipe
I’m going to tell you a neat little trick I use to find a good wine match for the recipes I make. Something you too can do with success, even if you don’t know much at all about wine. Now, sometimes I just know what I’d like to drink, and choose the recipe based on my wine choice. Other times, I let the recipe guide the wine choice. For example, when I recently made chili, I knew I wanted a Rhone red, because I knew it would match well with the meal. Food and wine pairing is partly subjective, and is a learning process, so I experiment, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Lots has soaked in from working in restaurants and reading about pairing for a few years, but the best way to learn what works is obviously to just eat a lot of meals, and drink a lot of wine, and see what works for you, based on your palate.
So here’s the trick: if I’m preparing something I’m not sure how to match up with wine, or I haven’t used the recipe before, or no wine immediately comes to mind that I have a feel would be an appropriate match, I log onto epicurious.com and do a recipe search. epicurious.com has this handy little feature that gives you several wine matches for each recipe. Here’s how it works: enter the recipe you want to make in the search box — say, “pasta primavera” — and epicurious returns several recipes — one may be an exact match to the recipe you entered, while several others are similar and/or will have like ingredients. Ok, so you’ve entered your recipe or ingredient list, and you now have several recipe options. Then click on the various recipe links to get the full recipe, ingredient list, and preparation method. Scroll down past this, and you’ll see something called “Wine Pairings for This Recipe,” which will give you around a dozen wines that pair well with your recipe. (If you click on the name of the wine, you’ll get more info about the winery, the region, price and varietal, and, where you can buy it online. Of course, when I’m searching for a wine match, it’s usually for a wine I want to buy to go with what I’m preparing that night, so the online option for buying the wine isn’t very useful to me.)
What I love about this wine matching tool is, it gives you specific suggestions, not “serve a spicy big red with BBQ or burgers,“ or, “serve chardonnay or similar with rich, buttery sauces,” etc. (This kind of thing makes me crazy, because it is so general, and not very useful to someone who doesn’t already know some about wine. And wine should be enjoyed by everyone! Wine populism!! Up with the people! OK, I’m off my soapbox now.) No, what you will get from your search are specific bottle suggestions, WITH approximate price point. And what’s great is, there will be a few white matches, a few red matches, and even a couple of Rosé matches, if appropriate. It’s awesome, because then you have a dozen or so wines to choose from — go red, go white, go Rosé; you’ll be able to do whatever floats your particular palate. And of 12 or so choices, you’re sure to find the wine you want, or something similar.
If the specific recipe you want is not in the epicurious database, the wine matching tool will still get the job done — look at all the recipes that are returned in the search, and find a recipe that uses similar ingredients in similar proportions, and you’re good to go. I’ve done this many times, and it works well. For example, I recently did a search on “lemon spaghetti,” and found nothing, but, there was a recipe for “Spaghetti with Cremini Mushrooms, Lemon and Thyme,“ which had a similar amount of lemon juice and lemon zest to the Giada lemon spaghetti recipe I wanted to prepare. So I used the wine suggestions for that recipe to guide my search for an appropriate match. It turned up several Oregon Pinot Noirs, a few Italian whites, and a couple of Rosés. (Boy howdy, was I ever tempted to buy a Rosé, because you all know how much I love those! But I didn’t.)
Since I also love reds, I went with the site’s suggestion of the Firesteed Oregon Pinot Noir 2007. This was a very nice match to the lemon spaghetti, AND, had the added bonus of being available at Harriss Teeter just up the street. World Market carries it as well, so now that I’m a fan, I know I’ll have no problem finding it again. As an experiment, on a recent Saturday night I searched for “vegetarian pizza” recipes on epicurious, because I had an Amy’s frozen Sun-dried Tomato, Broccoli and Pesto Pizza I was going to make. Several recipes for veggie pizza came up, so I looked at the wine matches for each, noting the wine choices. Again, there were some Pinot Noirs, a few Pinot Grigios and other Italian whites, a couple of Zinfandels, and a Dolcetto or two. I liked the idea of a Dolcetto best — a light-to-medium bodied Italian red that goes well with pizza and other tomato-based fare. Alas, I looked in 3 or 4 of my local wine stores, and not one had a Dolcetto of any kind! I was a touch surprised, but oh well, I decided to drink San Pelligrino with my pizza that night instead.
What you can do if your recipe search returns wines not available in your particular market is get something similar, which will be easy to do, because you’ll be armed with about a dozen wine choices. In the example above for lemon spaghetti, if the Firesteed Pinot Noir hadn‘t been available, I could have gotten another Pinot Noir, an Italian white, or a Rosé; any of those choices would’ve gotten the job done just as nicely. Similarly, for my veggie pizza, since I couldn’t find a Dolcetto, I might have gotten a Zinfandel, or another Italian red, such as a Chianti or a Barbera.
Sometimes, I go on epicurious.com with no recipe in mind and no plans to cook, and just enter recipes left and right to see which wine matches come up. I’ve gotten a ton of good ideas about food and wine pairings I want to do in the future this way, plus, learned lots about basic food and wine matching. It’s one of my favorite learning tools online. Go to epicurious.com and check it out!
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