How to choose the right wine to go with a meal
Choosing a good wine can be a real nightmare, especially when you’re trying to impress someone. You’re having a dinner party – you’ve planned the menu thoroughly, dusted off your best crockery and wine glasses, and got everything prepared – except for the wine selection. There’s just so much to think about, and it always seems like everyone else knows so much more about it than you do. You stand there for what seems like forever looking at the seemingly endless shelves of different bottles, and the more you think about it the harder it gets. That’s why we’ve put together a few tips of what to watch out for and how to choose the perfect wine to compliment your meal.
Firstly and most importantly, you need to match the wine to the meal you will be eating. Everyone has different opinions of which wine will taste good with different foods, but there are a few basic rules that you can follow if you’re really not sure. The easiest way is to match the colour of the wine to the food, you can’t go wrong. So if you’re eating red meat go for a dark red like Cabernet or Syrah. For lamb or pork a medium bodied red like a Merlot will be less heavy whilst still giving a rich flavour. Chicken and fish dishes can often be overpowered by reds so it’s best to go for a crisp white instead, perhaps a Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. If it’s a special occasion or celebration, you might be better off with a sparkling wine, served in fancy Champagne flutes.
Once you’ve worked out what kind of wine you are looking for, look at where it has come from. Wines from different regions are hugely different in quality, so it pays to do a bit of research into the best regions. If you’re not sure, France is always a safe choice and has been producing fine wines for hundreds of years. Italy is another good choice, and Chilean wines are also very popular at the moment, particularly the reds.
Another thing it’s a good idea to check is the vintage of the wines you are choosing from, or the year they were bottled. A real wine buff will already know which were the good years for each region, and will buy only vintages which they know came from a particularly good crop. For the rest of us less knowledgable people, it can seem like a lot of guesswork, but if you know a few of the basics you’ll be on the right track at least. A common misconception is that the older a wine is, the better it will taste. It’s true that most red wines do improve with a little aging, but most wineries don’t distribute these reds for a couple of years after bottling, which gives them time to mature. This means they are ready to drink and will taste good as soon as they become available. Most white and sparkling wines don’t need any aging, and taste good if drunk straight away.
Are expensive wines really worth it?
How many of us can really say we know anything about wine? Most people will be familiar with that feeling you get when you’re standing there looking at the rows and rows of bottles, with no idea what it is you’re actually supposed to be looking for. We assume that expensive wines cost more because they’re better and cheap wines should probably be avoided, but is there really any truth to this? I have tried both cheap wines that have tasted fine, and expensive ones that have been horrible – that’s not always the case by any means, but they do exist and how are we supposed to know which ones to choose?
It’s like the theory that crystal wine glasses make wine taste better than regular glasses. It’s true that it is nicer to drink out of a crystal glass, they do feel nice to hold and they make that lovely sound when you tap them, but I’ve yet to see any evidence that it actually affects the flavour of the drink. A nasty wine will taste nasty whatever you drink it from – just think of the familiar grimace on people’s faces when they take a sip from their posh celebratory Champagne flutes, only to be reminded that they’ve always hated Champagne and are only drinking it because it’s what you’re supposed to do.
A true wine buff would tell you they can guess the vintage of a good wine and the region where it was bottled just from tasting it. However in the opening episode of BBC4’s recent mini-documentary series entitled (rather inventively, I thought!) Wine, an interesting scenario took place. A group of professional wine experts were offered a taste from an unknown bottle and asked to guess the vintage. Most of the party placed it somewhere in the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert who said 1928. It turned out to be from 1870, proving that they really didn’t have a clue.
So do factors like the age and vintage of a wine really make any difference in terms of the quality of wine? If even the world’s most knowledgeable experts can’t tell the difference then it would seem that the answer is no, probably not. Older wines are likely to be rarer, which might explain why they cost more, but I bet those experts could have got a whole crate of good 1980s wines for the same price as that one bottle from the 1800s would have cost. And in these credit crunch times do people really want to be paying so much more for fancy wines when it’s entirely possible they could get one just as good – or maybe even nicer – in Threshers for under a tenner?