Eating Out and Wine, An Essential Guide: Part II, Picking A Wine

Besides the ritual of ordering the wine, you'll also have to decide on a wine you order.

The basic rule that most people say is something like "red wine with red meat and white wine with fish." In fact, things are much more complicated than that. Matching a wine to food involves considerations of the alcohol content of the wine, the sweetness/dryness, the tannin's, the acidity and the oaky-ness of the wine. By oaky-ness I mean the tendency of some California and Australian producers that age their wine in oak casks that can impart very strong oak overtones in the taste of the wine.

The alternative to the red/white rule are the similarity principles:

1. sweet food makes sweet wine test less sweet;
2. acidic food makes acidic wine taste less acidic;
3. bitter food makes slightly bitter wine taste less bitter;

These different element and characteristics of the wine means that it could possible to have certain red wines with fish and white wines with meat. It just depends of the qualities of the wine.

First, wine might not be the best choice. If the food is really spicy, in the sense that there are a lot of spices in the food and not just chilli's, it might be best just to take a pass and drink something else. For example, indian, thai, malayasian, morrocan/middle eastern food are all probably too spiced for most wines. A wine might start tasting fine and everything but once the spices in the food start getting into your mouth and mixing with the wine then its a different story (i having a lamb tajin with a californian cab; the wine really opened up after it aired out into something really good, but after the spices from the food started mixing with it, it really changed the wine for the worse, in an undrinkable way). This is not to say its impossible to match foods from these types of cuisines with wine, but just harder. As some examples, i've been to 93 Harbord a few times, which is morrocan and middle eastern food. I like the food, but the wines they have on their list don't really work well with the stuff on the menu. I had a conversation with the woman who owns the place and some guy they were with about the wine, and they expressed what kind of problems they face in terms of the wine list. Part of the problem, is that if you put wines that could work with food like that on the list, most people wouldn't go for them because they are so used to drinking the stuff they know. If you were going to 93 Harbord, i'd say stick to the beers (they have or at least had a nice selection). On the other hand, there's Kultura's wine list. I've been there a few times to eat and have wine there and every time I've been there I expect the wine to taste like shit half way through the meal, but it never happens. The sommelier has really spent a lot of time picking wines that can stand up to diversity of the food they have there. Although the tapas there are not super expensive, the wines tend to be on a slightly higher price point. The last time I was there I order a New Zealand Chardonnay from the Marlborough region and a Amarone Classico. Both were really good and held up to various spices in the food.

Second, try to get a rough idea of what kind of food is going to get ordered. Is it rich? Is it gamey? Is it light? All these will help determine with type of wine that might be the best fit for what you order.

Third, some wines that have the potential to work very well with food include:

• Dry German Riesling, which could accompany shell fish, fish, chinese and thai food, sausages, ham, cold meat, salami, cold poultry, pate, fatty meats (duck, goose and pork), vegetables that could be hard to find wine matches (corn, asparagus, beets and cauliflower).
• New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, oysters and shell fish are good matches. Go for something from the Marlborough region.
• Chablis, which is chardonnay wine from a particular region in Burgundy, France. This could be pretty pricey though.
• Beaujolous. Stay away from the ones marked as superiore, it just means that they have higher alcohol contents. The best ones the cru beaujolous, from the villages, which include Brouilly, cote de Brouilly, Chirables, Fluerie, Julienas, Regnie, Saint Amour, Chenas, Morgan, Moulin-a-Vent. The lightest one are from Brouilly. The heaviest ones from the last three. In fact, if you can get something from the last three (particularly Moulin-a-Vent) that's about 5-10 years old you get a wine that very similar to a red burgundy, but at a discount to the price. These wines can be difficult to find because I think a lot of people misunderstand them, but you should be able to find them at french bistros (particularly, the brouilly and moulin-a-vent varieties).
• Barbera, this will be a good accompaniment to italian food, especially stuff with a tomato sauce because it is a fairly acidic wine. I think you'll see these on wine lists at Italian restaurants and be priced reasonably. I've had some at Teronni, and I haven't been disappointed.
  
• California Pinot Noir, really good food wine that you can get at a lower price point to it cousins from Burgundy, which can be awesome but pricey.
• Australian Shiraz, I think this is the way to go with grilled read meat.

The German Rieslings might be hard to come by, so as a substitute you might go for the Canadian ones. Canadian whites can give a lot of white wines from France and Germany a real run for the money. Cave Springs had a really good Riesling a few years ago. I don't think that you could substitute a Canadian chardonnay for a chabilis, because the soil in that region in france gives the wine a really distinctive taste that isn't like the other white burgundies, like mersault. However, that said some Canadian Chardonnay's can press a Mersualt to the limit, given that the Canadian wine might be half as expensive as the Burgundy. The Canadian whites can deliver a really good wine at a reasonable price. You can even go on price a little to figure out the quality scale. So they provide a reasonable priced option for getting a really white wine when eating out.

There might be an additional complications when eating out. First, some restaurants don't have a huge selection on their wine lists. Second, a lot of wines will tend to be higher in alcohol content, tannins and oaky-ness, which could be bad from a food matching perspective, depending on what you order to eat. If you're stuck ask for some help. If you're at a decent place the servers should be fairly knowledgeable. There are some professional waiters from Europe around the city as well. They are usually the most authoritative when it comes to making suggestions (except for the French clown at Pangaea), it might be the accent or the good living back home that gives them that edge. The fail safe fall back option is you can never go wrong with an amarone; you just have to decide whether you want to pay the price (i.e., if the restaurant carries them).