Food and Wine Matching - It’s Elementary
Remember when food and wine matching was simple: red wine went with fish and white wine went with meat or was that the other way round? Tastes have changed now we eat cuisines from all over the world and like to experiment with our wine matches.
So what are the new rules? There’s no snappy solution, the adventurous diner now looks to the components of the dish and matches them to an appropriate style of wine. That’s where It’s Elementary comes in.
The It’s Elementary workshop takes the ‘elements’ in food i.e. salt, sugar, bitter, sour and umami and matches them with the ‘elements’ in wine i.e. tannins, alcohol, fruit and acidity. Participants discover, for example, how sweetness effects acidity in a wine (useful for Chinese cooks) or how tannins react to salt (is that Bordeaux the best choice for that salty ham?). At the end of the session everyone is armed with the know-how to match food and wine in a new and far more creative way.
Elementary it may be - but it's also very stimulating.
"Katrina led a Food & Wine Matching Workshop for our Society, which she entitled "It's Elementary". She used five very different popular wines with seven different basic food flavours, in a carefully structured way, to help us to experience a spectrum of effects on our taste buds - ranging from delightful to, occasionally, rather unpleasant !
The workshop in total, however, was entirely pleasant. The 65 members of our Society who attended found it very stimulating. We had a really sociable as well as a most informative experience."
Norman Maxwell,
programme secretary, Brentwood Wine Appreciation Society
(established 22 years / 90 current members)
