Food & Wine Pairing: The Real Rules

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm going to tell you about the real rules of food and wine pairing. If you think the rules of food and wine pairing are something like, red wine with meat, or white wine with fish, well those are some of the rules, however, those rules can be broken. The real rules of food and wine pairing are things that always work. And you're going to have to learn a series of them, which I'll be happy to share with you in just a minute. But the real rules of food and wine pairing are, food and wine pair up, change each other and work well together or don't work well together based on three things. They're based on the taste components of the food and wine. By taste components I mean salt, sour, sweet, and bitter. These things can really change the way food and wine interact, and in most cases, they're the most important thing to keep your eye on in a food and wine match up. The second most important thing is textures. Textures in food and textures in wine. We can, we can use the same vocabulary for both. It's rich, it's heavy, it's full, it's rustic, or it's light, uncomplicated, light bodied. It's generally best to match a food and wine based on texture, but there's a few exceptions to that that we'll learn. The third thing is flavors. When most people talk about food and wine pairing, all they talk about is flavors. Cherry flavor in the wine, cherry flavor on the sauce, something like that. But flavors are actually the least important thing when it comes to food and wine pairing. You could match them up or you could contrast them, and it doesn't really matter. What you really want to keep in mind is the taste and then the textures, and those are the real rules that can never be broken. And we'll see what they mean in just a minute."