The old adage, “White wine with white and red wine with red,” still applies to many food and wine pairings, but with a more modern twist. Today, some wines can be paired successfully against the old saying. A good pairing of food and wine will make both the food and wine taste better than if you were to have the drink and dish separately. To be successful in pairing wines with food, it is important to understand some basics of taste as well as understand the components of wine with food.

Taste
Taste is a combination of the nose, or smell, and tongue, or taste buds. The nose, in fact, can be much more important to taste than the tongue. The nose can pick up hundreds of different odor nuances that growing and processing can impart to the grape.

The tongue can discern sourness, or acidity; sweetness, or residual sugar levels; bitterness, such as alkaloids, or saltiness. Some experts add an additional category, savory, or umami, a taste related to aged or fermented foods.

Understanding taste is important in pairing wines with foods because you may want to complement or contrast the taste of the wine with the taste of the food in your pairings.

Aging
The taste imparted from aging can range from light or medium to intense. A lightly aged wine that has had a short time in the barrel can be more suitable to light fish dishes with no heavy sauces, or perhaps a light game, such as dove or quail. Depending on the sauce, a riesling, chenin blanc or maybe even a white zinfandel might be suited. Remember that light-bodied whites may not see any oak time.

Body
It is also important to balance body, or intensity, when pairing food and wine. Body can be related to the alcohol content of a wine. Full-bodied wines can consist of 13%-15% alcohol. For example, you would not want to pair a light wine with a robust dish. A wine with a high alcohol content may be attractive to the novice, but it can overshadow the nuances of the food and the grape that the winemaker has nurtured.