Tips & Tricks: Red Wine with Fish?

23 05 2011

The very first “ironclad” wine and food pairing rule that I was ever told is so ubiquitous that I’m sure you’ve all heard it too:  red wine with meat, white wine with fish.  But is this prohibition on mixing red wines and fish fact or fiction?  As with any good urban legend, it’s a bit of both.

There really is no caption that can improve on this picture.

First the fact:  it is a good idea to avoid pairing particularly oily foods with wines that are high in tannin (for a longer explanation on what tannin is, click here) because the two combine to produce unpleasant metallic or tinny flavours on the palate.  Generally speaking, fish is quite oily as compared to other cuts of meat, and red wines are the most likely candidates to be high in tannin, as white wines usually have little to no detectable tannins; as a result, it is certainly true that some red wines and some fish will not be a happy mix.  The iodine present in fish can also have a similar negative reaction with tannin (and, at least according to this article, the traces of iron in certain red wines will clash with fish), so following the basic “no red wine with fish” rule can help you avoid disastrous gastronomic consequences.

However, it is fiction to say that red wine and fish can never be successfully paired together. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : Tips & Tricks

Tips & Tricks: Wine’s Building Blocks and How To Detect Them

22 04 2011

For those loyal PnP readers (if such a thing exists), some of this will cover ground trekked out before in previous posts, but I thought it would be useful to get all of this info in one place.  Describing the smells and flavours of wine is inevitably a subjective experience, since we all process aromas and tastes differently, but that doesn’t mean that every description about wine is solely in the eye of the beholder.  Every wine has a number of objectively-discernable components that form the architecture of the overall wine; even if reasonable minds can differ about a wine’s flavour profile, they should generally come to common ground when discussing these vinicultural building blocks.  Here are the key components of a wine and how to pick them out of your glass: Read the rest of this entry »


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The Basics: What’s Tannin?

16 03 2011

If you’re just getting into wine, you’re finding out that there is a LOT of information to assimilate and some steep learning to do.  Some of it, like figuring out the grape varieties and the major wine regions and the top producers, isn’t so bad, because it primarily just involves drinking a lot.  But other stuff, like the never-ending list of vocabulary that goes into describing a wine, is a lot trickier and can often become a barrier that increases the intimidation factor of wine to the point where many people decide it’s not worth the effort.

This should clear everything up...

For me, one of the terms in the wine glossary that I had the most trouble with was tannin.  Every wine review you see (including my own reviews below) makes reference to a particular bottle’s smooth, silky, bitter, soft, graceful, harsh or (stop me anytime) aggressive tannins…I had no idea what any of this meant until a couple years ago, well after I had started buying wine regularly.  Since it turns out that tannin is one of the basic building blocks of red wine and something that has to be understood by any would-be wine lover sooner or later, here’s my attempt at a primer. Read the rest of this entry »


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Categories : The Basics