Wine and Food

Wine and Food

How what you eat affects what you drink.

Which wines taste best with steak? How about with sisig or sinigang? The food you eat can either complement your wine or could make it taste worse. Read on to know how different tastes interact with wine and how to determine which wines go with the food you’re eating.

Wine can be drank on its own, but in order to get more out of your wine, you might want to try pairing it with food. Before we begin, it is important to note that personal preferences play a role in determining which food would go best with that glass of wine in your hands. What may be good for one person may not be good for another, just as what may taste mildly sweet for some might taste awfully sweet for another person. With this in mind, you should take into account these personal preferences when pairing. That being said, let’s get into how different tastes affect how you taste wine.

Science has told us that there are five taste elements that make up how we perceive flavor. These elements are: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (the latest addition to these). In this article, we will look at how these flavors or tastes in food affect how we taste wine. Through this interaction, we will then know which wines to pair with the food we eat. Let’s get started!

Sweetness: Sweetness in food can make a wine seem less fruit and more acidic. This is why sweet wines (dessert wines) are almost always paired with a dish that is equally as sweet or sweeter—because it also reduces the taste of sweetness and fruitiness in the wine. By doing so, we are able to taste the other flavors in the wine aside from just sweetness. Sweet food can basically increase how bitter you perceive the wine, its acidity, and the feeling of alcohol.

Saltiness: Salt, just as with food, helps enhance the flavor of wine. This is why a wine will taste less bitter, less acidic, and will improve the body of a wine when it is paired with something salty. If you want to improve the taste of a bitter or acidic wine, try it with something salty.

Sourness: An acidic or sour meal will generally be a good thing for a glass of wine, especially a highly acidic one. When taken with something sour, other flavors in the wine are allowed to shine as it decreases your taste of acidity in the wine. At the same time, a wine will feel fuller, sweeter, and perhaps even more fruity!

Bitterness: Contrary to what you may be thinking, that eating something bitter may decrease the bitter taste of wine, the opposite happens. Bitter food actually heightens the taste of bitterness in a wine. So eating something bitter to go along with that already tannic wine will actually make it taste even more bitter. Remember...be better, not bitter!

Umami-ness: A fairly new flavor and the official term for something savory (think: asian food, also meats cooked for a long time, onions, tomatoes, asparagus, parmesan cheese, mushrooms and kombu seaweed), the umami taste in food actually increases the taste of bitterness, acidity, and the unpleasant feeling of alcohol in food. Aside from this, the wine may seem less full-bodied, less sweet, and less fruity. Umami is a taste that is usually accompanied by saltiness, but the two are totally different. It is important then to be aware of this flavor as it may have the opposite effect of salt on the way a wine tastes and feels in your mouth. 

Aside from these tastes, also consider spiciness, the presence of which may heighten the burning sensation of alcohol in the mouth and down your throat. 

After learning about these interactions, the best way to experience them is to try them out in real life. So, we encourage you to try your favorite glass of wine with some food and see how the food affects his taste. Remember: we are all built differently and other people´s preferences may be different from ours. So, go and try what pairing works best for you!

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