How to Pair

Pairing wine, beer, spirits, and cocktails with food is one of the most fun and rewarding things about drinking.  The perfect pairing can highlight flavors in both the food and the beverage, or bring out new flavors or combinations of flavors.  Between cook books, beer books, bar books, and the internet, it's fairly easy to find suggestions for specific pairings, especially classic ones.  Far more fun, though, is to make your own pairings, and knowing how to do it is a great skill to have, especially as new cuisines enter our daily lives, or are created.

The Golden Rule of Pairing
Don't let the food, or the beverage, overpower the other.  This is the basis for the basic wine pairing rule about red wine with red meat, white wine with white meat.  In its most basic form, this refers primarily to body (how "big"is a particular dish, and how "big"is the drink?).  More full bodied, tannic, alcoholic, and oaked beers, wines, spirits, and cocktails, should go with heartier dishes.  The idea is that the pairing should highlight both the food and the spirit.  Eating a heavy dish with a light pinot grigio is going to cause the flavors of the wine to be totally lost.  Likewise, eating a simple chicken, fish, or salad dish with a big, tannic cabernet suavignon, is a waste of perfectly good food, as the wine will overpower the food.

The rule can be extended to flavors as well, though.  No matter how light a salad, if there is a pungent bleu cheese involved, a simple, clean wine can easily be lost.  Similarly, even the lightest bodied, lowest alcohol IPAs should be cautiously paired with simple, light fare, because the bitterness of the hops can easily overpower many dishes.

The 3 Functions of a Good Pairing
There are three main ways that your food and your drink should interact: complement, balance, and cleanse.
Complementing food and drink can be a great way to pair.  If a dish is sweet, a sweet beer, wine, or cocktail can cause the dish to be that much more delectable.  Similarly, if you're eating black pepper beef, a zinfandel with strong black pepper flavors can really highlight the dish, and bring out new flavors in both the food and the wine.
Balancing food and drink also works.  If there are strong flavors, sometimes the best way to show them off is to contrast them with other strong flavors.  This is why many sommeliers will pair spicy Mexican or Asian cuisine with sweet or semi-sweet German whites.  The contrast in flavors really brings out both the spice of the food, and the sweetness of the wine.  It also challenges the palate to find the underlying flavors, which may be more similar than you would notice on their own.
Cleansing the palate can benefit both the food and the drink.  Creamy, citrusy flavors tend to cleanse the palate well, as do effervescent, or sparkling libations.  If either the food or the drink has strong, pungent flavors, using the other item to clean the palate off before moving on to the next course can be refreshing.  This is why wine tastings are often accompanied by cheese, and especially softer cheeses.  Tasters want each wine to start with a fresh palate to bring out the full flavor.  The same can work with food.  After a particularly spicy dish, or one with strong flavors like garlic or bleu cheese, a beer, wine or cocktail with strong citrus notes, a creamy, buttery wine, or a cocktail with citrus or cream in it, can give the next dish a fresh, cleansed palate.

The fun part is that following one of these rules will almost always lead to a good pairing.  More fun is trying to find a beverage or dish which fills more than one roll.  Back to the black pepper beef and the zinfandel.  The bodies of both dishes match, as both are on the heavier side, but not overwhelmingly big.  The black pepper complements each other.  The jammy, fruity flavors of most zinfandels will also provide a good balance to the more savory, spicy flavors of the beef.

A Special Warning
One easy to make mistake is to pair spicy food and bitter drinks, especially hoppy beers or tannic wines.  The same alpha acids that give us bitter flavors (whether hoppy, skunky bitter as common or beer, or the astringent, tannic bitter found in wines) amplify heat.  This can be a good thing, but needs to be accounted for.  Dishes with well rounded spiciness, or heat balanced with sweetness in the dish (curries, for example), can pair really well with a tannic wine or a somewhat hoppy beer (think British pale ales, or British style IPAs).  A West Coast IPA or a young, very tannic cabernet, though, will probably amplify the heat to the point that it may kill the rest of what's going on in both the food and the drink.  Something that's spices are already incredibly hot, without a lot of other spice flavors going on (buffalo wings, anything with habaneros, etc.) are probably better paired with something less hoppy or tannic.

Another rule-and why you should bend it
One thing a lot of people will tell you about pairing food with drinks, or cooking with alcohol, is that if it's not something you like, and you wouldn't drink it on its own, you shouldn't use it.  I agree with the sentiment, but disagree.  Obviously, you want to enjoy both your meal and your libation.  However, a proper pairing can make a drink or a dish totally different.  There are wines that I would never open a bottle of just for casual drinking, but love to drink with the right meal, and for totally different reasons.  The right dish adds character to a wine (pinot grigio, for example) that is otherwise pretty boring for me.  I don't eat seafood, but there are some wines which pair so well with certain dishes that they will have me devouring a prawn or lobster tail.  So no, don't pair just any swill with something.  But keep an open mind, and your pairing could change your opinion of a certain drink, dish, or both.

With these tips, it should be easy to create your own fun pairings with any wine, beer, spirits, or cocktails.  Play around, and don't be afraid to break away from the classic pairings.  Keep these tips in mind, and you can create exciting new combinations, and wow your friends and family when you start pairing like a pro.

Tasting Notes: Barefoot Moscato

First, let me explain how I wound up drinking this wine.
I live alone, and like to cook.  Every time I go to the store to find something to cook, I try to pick a wine, beer, or cocktail to go with what I'm making, just to challenge/test my own pairing abilities and knowledge.
The other night, I cooked Asian-inpsired chicken lettuce wraps.  Pairing wine and beer with Asian and Latin food is always fun, since these cultures are not big wine and beer drinkers, meaning that there aren't really "conventional"or "traditional"pairings to go with.  Also, the spice in a lot of Asian food means you can usually pick a relatively sweet wine, which you would not usually drink with a main course, to balance the spice and heat.  Vons didn't have a huge selection of pre-chilled sweeter white wines, so this is the one I chose.  Of course, I forgot to add the onions and the ginger to my wraps, which means the pairing wasn't quite as perfect as I would have liked.  Now for the fun part:

Appearance: Pretty light, almost clear, very little straw or golden coloring on this one.  Legs were more like smudges than clean streaks running down the glass.

Aroma: Honey and booze.

Body/mouth feel: Medium.  Not as syrupy/thick as the appearance, aroma, and sweetness would suggest.

Flavors: Honey on the beginning of the palate, peaches after that, with a fairly long, honey finish.

Overall impressions: For being a $4 bottle of wine, not too terrible.  Moscatos, especially inexpensive ones, run a risk of being almost too sweet, and syrupy sweet.  This one fit the profile.  Would be nice if it had just a touch of acidity, or a little more carbonation, to cut through the sweetness, but overall, a great value at $4.  Probably would have been better had the food I paired it with had  a little more heat/spice to it, or paired with a dessert, rather than a main.

Thanks for reading, and as always, feel free to leave comments, questions, or suggestions for future posts in the comments, by e-mail (livingbuzzed@gmail.com), or Tweet me (@livingbuzzed).

Absinthe? Is it legal? Is it safe? Will it make me crazy?

Absinthe is one of the most misunderstood and mysterious spirits on the market.  Its history is full of road bumps, prohibitions, and myths that make it that much more confusing, and appealing.  So, here's a list of the common questions people ask about absinthe.

What is Absinthe?
Absinthe is a spirit with grand wormwood, green anise, and fennel flavoring.  Unlike most other spirits, it is not overly regulated or protected by laws, meaning distillers can make any number of products, and legally call them absinthe.  It also does not fall into any of the seven major "families" of spirits (vodka, rum, gin, tequila, whiskey, liqueur, or brandy), since it does not meet requirements for any of them, and unlike liqueurs (which can similarly contain just about anything) is not bottled with any artificial or added sweetness.  So absinthe can have a fruit (usually white grape, and typical of the most traditional high-end absinthes) or grain base.  It can be redistilled to instill flavors and colors, or can have them added through essential oils or compounds (cold compounding).  They can be clear, or any number of shades of green.

That being said, absinthe is usually a fairly high proof (90-148 proof) spirit which tastes like a very herbal version of licorice and contains wormwood or wormwood oil.

Is absinthe legal?
In most parts of the world, at present time, yes.  In some countries (Spain , Portugal, the UK, and others), absinthe has always been legal.  In most other Western countries, absinthe was banned some time between 1906 and 1915.  Most of those bans have been lifted between 2000 and 2011, due to conflicts with EU regulations, with other national food or beverage laws, or just a general cultural shift.

Is the absinthe that's now legal in the U.S. real?
Yes.  The largest confusion in this is that there was a product, pre-2007, which was called "Absente," which contained no wormwood oils, and was artificially sweetened, but was similar in flavor profile to absinthe.  This product was nothing like the "real" absinthe available at the time in parts of Europe.  In 2007, the FDA redefined a part of the food codes to declare anything with under 10mg/kg of thujone could be called "thujone free," and thus could be legally produced, imported, and sold in the United States.  This limit is lower than in some European countries, so our absinthe may have less wormwood and thujone in it than some European brands, but it does contain all the same ingredients.

What is thujone?  Is it really a hallucinogen?
Thujone is the chemical found in wormwood which is in the same family as THC (the chemical in pot which gives it its psychoactive properties).  Although both critics and artistic fans of absinthe claimed that this chemical gave it dangerous hallucinogenic properties, this has been scientifically disproved.  Thujone, and thus absinthe, will not make you hallucinate.  Nor will they trigger the same receptors that THc will in the brain.  That being said, it is not conclusively proven one way or the other whether thujone has psychoactive properties independent of alcohol.  Toxicity studies have shown both psychological and physiological effects of thujone, but only in concentrations nearly impossible to reach by drinking absinthe, especially since the high proof would lead to experiencing serious alcohol issues long before the threshold for these effects of thujone were felt.

That being said, in my personal experience, abisnthe gives a different type of buzz.  It is much more mellow, and clear-headed than the buzz I get off of drinking other spirits.  It is a little thought provoking, or some might even say "mind opening."  Then again, I've experienced a different type of "whiskey buzz" than "vodka buzz," and different types of buzz based on where I am and who I'm with, so we'll leave it for the scientists to figure out if the "absinthe buzz" is caused by thujone, one of the many other botanicals used in absinthe production, or just the experience of the whole absinthe ordeal.

Got questions?  Comments?  Suggestions for future posts?  Post them in the comments, or send them to livingbuzzed@gmail.com or @livingbuzzed on Twitter!

I'm a 27 year old restaurant and bar manager in Los Angeles.  I work in a craft beer-focused place, where our bar program is all-California, and all-craft.  I am a Certified Beer Server, and currently studying for the Certified Specialist of Spirits, Introductory Sommelier, and Certified Cicerone exams.  So in addition to working with booze, and playing with booze, I'm now studying booze.  And I love it!  I once wanted to be a journalist, and so I figured what better way to keep my writing skills up to par than to write about what I love, and spend a lot of my time working with.

My plans for the blog are pretty open-ended so far.  I'll be writing about beer, wine, and spirits.  From specific product reviews, previews, and tasting notes, to historical and scientific knowledge, to fun facts.

I want this to be a forum for discussion, and to draw in as many readers as possible, so, through the comments section, I will also take questions, comments, feedback, or suggestions for future posts.  If it's related to beer, wine, or spirits, it's fair game.

Cheers!-Z