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.
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