Food & Wine Pairing: Tastes

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm going to tell you about the real secrets of food and wine pairing. The main secret of pairing up food and wine and any food with any wine is to look at the tastes components of both the food and wine. You probably remember learning about the taste components in high school or even in elementary school. Taste components are basically considered to be salt, sweet, sour and bitter. The first thing we want to do when we want to pair up food and wine is too look at the food. We want to make sure we know if it's sweet or not. Sweet can be a dessert of course. But it can also be an entrée with a little bit of sweetness, like turkey with cranberry sauce. If there is sweetness in the food, we're going to have to keep that in mind when we're talking about a wine pairing. The next thing we want to do is see if it's salty. Saltiness is where you can taste it in the middle of your tongue. If so that's another thing we are going to have to keep in mind when we pair it up with wine. Then we want to look for a little bit of bitterness. You can taste bitterness mostly in the back of your tongue and usually on the after taste of a food or wine. If there is bitterness in the food we're going to have to keep that in mind for our wine pairing also. The last thing you want to look at is the acidity. Most food has acidity. Acidity is kind of like a turbo charge of a taste. It's one of the things that makes food taste good. So you want to see if there is sweetness, saltiness, acidity or sourness or any bitterness in your food. And then we're going to have to learn the rules about each of the ways that those taste components pair up with wine. If there is sweet, sour, salt or bitter in your food, it will definitely change the way your wine tastes. And we're going to have to learn how that works. It's the most important part of food and wine pairing, always."