Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Tip of the Day: Easy Wine Pairing

Tonight I went to a Wine Club meeting. In between pretentious comments from aspiring sommelier classmates ("Don't be afraid to let this chard open up, it's not performing yet" or "If I was on my death bed, I'd have to choose old red Burgundy"), I did pick up a very useful tip.

When in doubt about what to pour, pick a dry rose wine.

Pink wines have lost the negative connotations of the past, namely because roses these days have nothing to do with white zin. Rose is a really flexible wine because it has the refreshing quality of white wine but a little more structure like a red. A dry rose won't be sweet or syrupy, which makes it a great partner for those in-between foods.

What goes with this salad nicoise with seared tuna?

What goes with spicy Indian food?

What about a lean meat, like tenderloin? If there isn't much fat to cut through, do I need the tannins of a bigger red?

No, you don't. Try a rose.

Tonight we drank a Barnard-Griffin Sangiovese Rose 2008 from the Columbia Valley in Washington state. Easy to drink and delicious with the spicy Indian potatoes.

I'm learning about wine by leaps and bounds here, and I get to drink it!

2 comments:

  1. ahahahaha i am reading this again and i sound as pretentious as the people i'm mocking.
    geek!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ruthie, I couldn't agree more about dry rose. When we first released our wine pairing website and iPhone app, we didn't have dry rose as an option in our results. We quickly realized what a mistake that was because it's such a great pairing with South Asian food and other tough-to-pair dishes. Now we're even splitting the category into dry, off-dry and sparkling roses. Great tips! Makes my mouth water for Brut Rose and Indian food...

    ReplyDelete