We all enjoy a good meal.
Many people enjoy a glass of wine with a good meal.
However, not everyone knows which wines are the best match with which type of food.
With that, SooToday asked Kevin Sinclair, Delta Hotels Sault Ste. Marie Waterfront senior food and beverage manager, for some basic advice on that topic.
Sinclair is a sommelier — a French word meaning wine waiter or wine steward — with professional knowledge and experience in wine and food pairing.
“The weight of the wine should go with the weight of the dish,” Sinclair said.
Steak and red wine, for example, go well together.
“If you’re going to have a big juicy ribeye steak you’ll want a wine that stands up to it," he said. "With something like a ribeye you need that astringency, or bitterness, in red wine that you would rarely see in white wine. For steak — which has rich, fatty protein — you’ll want a nice red wine. Those complement each other well.”
Pasta, Sinclair said, should always be paired with red wine.
Red wine, he added, wouldn’t work well with fish.
“Some really rich red wines, with fish, will make the fish taste metallic," Sinclair said. "It’s not a good match. Other things to avoid would be rich red wines and spicy foods. Spicy food is going to enhance the bitterness so red wine with spicy foods is definitely something you want to avoid."
Salads, such as a Caesar salad, go best with white wines.
“A white wine imparts buttery flavours and texture to salad,” Sinclair said.
A good guideline to follow when wining and dining, he added, is to pair pleasant-smelling aromatic dishes with aromatic wines.
“Let’s say you had a mild pad thai, (a stir-fried rice noodle dish), then dry Riesling wines (which are lighter in colour) would be fantastic.”
Many foods go well with champagne, Sinclair said.
“You can pair that with anything, like oysters, a light steak, chicken, fish, even popcorn. It’s a super flexible pairing wine.”
Those are some basic guidelines, but Sinclair said there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to wine and food pairing.
“Outside of those, it’s pretty open.”
Sinclair shared some of his own experiences with wine that led to his becoming a sommelier.
“There was a particular wine that sang to me. It was an older Chardonnay from Ontario that had some age to it. It was so different from any wine I had before and from that moment I was bit. I had to find out more.”
His personal tastes are high acid white wines from Ontario, New Zealand or France.
“I like rose (pronounced ‘roe-zay’) with anything,” Sinclair said with a chuckle.
“A dry rose is one of those super flexible wines. Not for a big steak but with scallops, a salad or even hamburger helper. A rose can fill a lot of those gaps.”
Sinclair studied culinary arts at Sault College, graduated in 2010 and worked at The Water Tower Inn before joining the Delta team in 2012.
He was initially trained as a sommelier in Toronto and recently completed more training in Chicago.
“The world of wine is always changing,” Sinclair said.
He reiterated that food and wine pairing, despite friendly advice to diners from a sommelier, is a personal choice.
“Our tastes are different. I may think ‘this is a great pairing’ but someone else would just think ‘this is okay.’”
“The role of a sommelier is to recommend a wine that would be good with what you’ve ordered for dinner. I love having some fun with customers where I can give them two or three samples of wine that I think will work well with a particular dish and ask which one they enjoy the most,” Sinclair said.
“The job of a sommelier is to be hospitable. We just want to create that experience for you.”
