How To Grow Your Hospitality Business
Excerpt 2
Matching Food with Wine

Much has been made in recent years of the secrets of matching food with wine. There really is no mystery and it is quite a simple task. The most important aspect in determining a good match, is to understand the varietal characteristics of the wine. These are the flavours that the wine imparts both as a smell and when tasting. The aroma is the varietal characteristics that the grape displays. It you picked a sauvignon blanc grape from the vine, you would recognise some of the flavours that appear in the wine. The bouquet is the smell of the wine but includes the influences of the wine making process. Use of oak barrels for fermentation or ageing may be evident in the bouquet. With food, the key to wine matching is to replicate these flavours of the wine in the dish. A chardonnay may be described as ripe tropical fruit, citrus with a hint of oak. This could be matched with a roasted chicken breast with lemon (citrus) and a paw paw (tropical fruit) salsa.

Understanding your Palate
Tasting wine without food is a completely different experience from tasting wine with food. Your palate changes. The first step is to understand how we taste.

• Sweetness is sensed on the tip of the tongue and is a fleeting sensation which is one of the reasons why we want to take a second mouthful
• Acidity (sourness) is tasted on the side on the tongue.
• Flavour and saltiness is tasted down the middle of the tongue.
• Bitterness lingers at the back of the tongue and is often not apparent until the food has been swallowed (think of grapefruit).

For food or wine to have a well developed and full bodied taste, it is important to have a little of all of these things, excluding bitterness. Sugar or honey will bring the flavour forward on the tongue. You will taste this first. Acid (lemon juice, vinegar, wine) gives complexity, crispness and freshness. Salt and pepper add flavour. Fat coats your mouth and that is why it feels so good. It is smooth and creamy.

When we taste wines, we experience the same sensations. Ripe fruit in wine gives the initial sweetness we crave. Acidity gives life to the wine. If there was no acid, the wine would taste like cordial with alcohol. In red wine we taste tannins which give the chewy dry feel in the mouth and a lingering finish.

When matching food with wine it is important to consider how sweet the wine or the food will be. A sweet meal will taste sweeter if paired with a dry wine, at the same time the wine will taste dryer and more acidic. A full bodied wine can overpower the more subtle flavours of the food. The ripe oaky chardonnay that we so like to drink, is often too flavoursome for the food it is paired with. The herbaceous sauvignon blanc, that first drew international attention to New Zealand wines can be so fresh and fruity that it is difficult to match with delicately flavoured food. I prefer to serve it as an apéritif. With red wine, the deliciously fruity shiraz with it velvet mouth feel is a great match for strong flavoured foods but it too can overpower and confuse the palate. When matching a menu with wines it is important not to overwork the palate so that the following course is deflated and empty because you have lost all sensitivity to taste.

Change the Wine
Gone are the days when we drank the same wine from the beginning to end of a meal. Did you ever wonder why that delicious dessert that you laboured over, tasted so ordinary when it came time to eat it? It was probably because you still had half a glass of cabernet to finish. Changing wine as you change the course makes a menu so much more interesting. This alone can be a WOW. The change complements the menu and helps the diner to focus on the different tastes that the meal and the wines create.

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