Wine and Food Pairings -- Which Wine to Serve with Dinner

Most people love to throw dinner parties for their friends and family.  But, they may avoid serving wine because they do not know exactly what to serve.  Do you serve red or white with fish?  Will Merlot be okay if you are serving a Mexican dish?  Do not stress over it -- there are some basic wine rules you can follow.

The number one rule of thumb when choosing wine is "red wine with red meat, white wine with white meat."  This is not always true, but it generally works quite well when you are unsure.  One exception is chicken.  The meat is white, but a nice fruity red wine goes well with it.  The same can be said for tuna or salmon, so you do not have to always follow the rule of not serving red wine with fish.  The second rule is the rule of complements.  It is okay to match sweet seafood such as lobster with a sweet white wine.  The next rule is the opposites attract.  While you usually want to match like flavors, sometimes a contrast, such as a White Bordeaux with bluefish can be wonderful.

Outside of the basic rules, there are certain things you can look for and certain things you can avoid depending on what you are serving.  Here are some hints as to what to serve with particular types of food.

Salads and Appetizers

You should avoid serving wine during your salad, as vinegar and wine do not mix well.  But, if you are having an appetizer, you need to consider the ingredients in the appetizer to help you choose your wine.  If you are having a cheese tray, the type of cheese will help you determine the wine.  For example, cheddar is best with dry reds, Merlots, and Cabernet Sauvignon.  Pinot Noir goes best with Swiss.  Camembert and brie are great with a Chardonnay.  The cheese we tend to think of as Italian such as parmigiano, romano, and reggiano go well with Italian dry red wines like Chianti and Barlol.  If you are serving something a fried appetizer, consider serving a crisp, fruity white or red wine to help cut the oily flavor.

Beef, Steak and Lamb

Do you remember the "red wine with red meat" rule?  That one is great to use when serving beef, steak, and lamb.  Choose a dry red wine like Cabernet Sauvignon or a burgundy like Pinot Noir.  You can also consider serving an Italian red such as Barolo or Chianti.

Fish and Seafood

To be safe, stick with a dry, crisp white wine.  Sauvignon Blanc goes well with white fish while Sancerre and Muscadet go well with oysters.  If you want to be different, try a fruity red wine (without tannins).  But, use caution when serving red, especially if you are serving white, delicate fish.  Cabernets with tannins combined with fish can leave a metallic taste in your mouth.

Poultry, Pork and Veal

For the most part, you want to follow the "white meat, white wine" rule with these.  White chardonnays and Pinot Blancs are great.  If you want to serve red with chicken, remember to choose a wine that is fruity like a Merlot or Zinfandel.

Turkey

Think back to Thanksgiving.  Do you remember how well your cranberry sauce went with the turkey?  The same rule applies here.  For turkey, since it has both white and dark meat, you want something fruity and tart such as a Beaujolais for red or a Riesling for white.

Spicy Foods

If you are planning on service something spicy like Thai or Indian food, a sparkling wine works best.  Avoid wines with tannins and look for something fruity.  And, make sure the wine is well chilled.  Cold wine goes well with spicy foods.

Dessert

The best thing to serve with a delicious dessert is a dessert wine.  In fact, you can skip the dessert part and just serve a dessert wine to your guests.  These are sweet wines often sold in smaller bottles as you don't drink as much dessert wine as you do regular wine.  Wines such as Sauternes, Beerenauslese, Bermet and Cammandaria will make a great end to any evening.

The most important rule about what wine to serve is to avoid being snobby about wine.  There are no right answers, only basic rules to go by and even those, as you have seen, can be changed.  Do not be afraid to experiment with different tastes.  Chances are if you do not act like there is anything wrong with the wine you are serving, your guests will not either.

Wine Accessories At Kitchen Junkie

Wine is more than an alcoholic beverage.  It's almost a way of life!  There are more wine accessories available than you could even imagine.  From the necessities like corkscrews and glasses, to the not so necessary yet entertaining accessories like decanters, ice buckets, and pourers- there is more to wine than just drinking it.

Corkscrews & Openers

While there are hundreds of varieties of corkscrews, they all work in basically the same fashion.  You screw one end directly into the center of the wine's cork, and use a handle to life the cork out of the bottle in order to enjoy your bottle of wine.

If you want something other than a corkscrew, you can find another style of opener that uses cartridges to ''pop'' the cork out of the bottle.  The pop style openers tend to be a little more expensive than the traditional corkscrew, but image is everything when it comes to wine, and a specialty opener may be just the extra accessory you need for your dinner parties or restaurant atmosphere.

Decanters

Decanters are glass bottles with special shapes designed to encourage the heightening of wine flavors when you store your open wine in them.  They also make for a nice presentation when you place the decanter on the table.

There are literally countless different shapes and styles that decanters come in.  Many resemble a glass flower vase.  Certain wines should be placed in specific shapes of wine decanters in order to enhance the flavor of the wine to the fullest extent.  Others can be stored in any of the fancy decanters.

For an incredible display, you could find a decanter with it's own base unit.  These are highly stylish, and often hold the decanter at an angle, and suspended over the table.

Some decanters come with glass ball stoppers to be placed on the opening of the bottle in order to keep the freshness in when the wine is stored.  Air can have damaging effects to the properties of wine, and so it's usually best to keep open wine in an airtight container.

Additionally, some decanters are able to remove sediments from older wine and aerate younger wines to further enhance their flavors.

Decanters are certainly not necessary to drinking wine (you can place the cork back in the bottle of a wine to keep the air out when you're not pouring the wine) but they certainly make for a nicer presentation and can actually help the overall flavor of the wine.

Wine Racks

Where do you store your wine bottles?  If you're like most people, you keep them in one of your kitchen cabinets until you're ready to use them, or maybe in the basement.  If you drink wine often, however, you would probably enjoy having an elegant and functional wine rack in the kitchen or dining room that is designed to display and hold your wine bottles, glasses, and accessories.

Some wine racks are mounted to overhead cabinet space, so that the bottles are placed lying down inside them, while the glasses hang from their stems.  These are perfect for kitchens with decent space under their overhead cabinets.  If you don't have the room for this style of wine rack, there are wine racks that sit directly on the counter, and hold the bottles at arms reach.

If your kitchen simply doesn't have the space on the counter top or under the overhead cabinets for these styles, you can enjoy a wine rack that stands alone.  These often have small base units, sometimes refrigerated, as well as space for glasses and accessories.  They take up more floor space, but can really dress up a dining area.

Why All Wine Connoisseurs Must Purchase A Wine Storage Cooler

As the years pass, the quality and taste of wine changes.  The manner in which wine is stored can either slow or hasten this natural process.  Whether you are storing white or red wine, sparkling whine or champagne, it may be necessary to invest in a wine storage cooler in order to protect your assortment of fine beverages.

Wine storage coolers are available in a vast array of stores.  Even the lower end consumer retailers have gotten into the party.  It is not uncommon to find great deals on these products from stores like Walmart and Target.  Of course, for the more luxurious wine aficionados out there, high end retailers have more aesthetically pleasing and electronically sound wine storage cooler for sale.

What does a wine storage cooler do?  It sounds simple and many of you are probably wondering why not just use the household refrigerator.  The reason for this is that the storage temperature required for food to be kept fresh and the temperature required to keep wine properly cooled is different.

Food generally requires a much lower temperature.  Another reason is that the continuous opening of the refrigeration causes temperature readings to change.  Wine needs to be kept at a constant temperature in order to preserve its color, taste and quality.

Another problem to consider is that different types of wine require different temperature settings.  You are not going to have this flexibility with a standard refrigerator.  Many wine storage cooler are manufactured with the ability to delegate different temperature and humidity zones.  For instance, if you have a fine bottle of white and a deep red wine, you can set two different settings in your wine storage cooler to ensure the preservation of the liquid.

Besides the obvious usefulness of the wine storage cooler, there is an aesthetic component to having one in your home.  When a visitor sees a wine storage cooler, the immediate connection is made with luxury and class.

There are a ton of products on the market for you to choose from.  The best way to begin your search is by viewing consumer reports, fine wine magazines and doing some Internet research.

If you go to wine tasting events, you might want to ask some of the other attendees and even the wine manufacturers which devices are the best to keep your wine as fresh as possible.

Under Counter Coolers: The Modern Wine Cellar

Not too many years back if you heard the term wine cooler, your thoughts automatically went to Bartles & James and if someone told you about their wine collection you pictured a dusty underground vault, where bottles lined the walls in orderly rows, slowly aging to perfection.  Your average person that lived in your average suburban home could enjoy a good glass of wine when out on the town, but seldom had the capacity to store wine in optimal conditions at home.  With the advent of under counter coolers, a wine cellar is no longer a necessity in order to be a collector of fine wines.  In fact, anyone can turn their kitchen into modern day wine cellar.

Fine wines are expensive and they are only worth the money if you have a place to store them.  Wine is alive, constantly changing according to its environment.  Lots of things affect what changes a wine, including temperature, humidity, darkness, calm, ventilation and the angle at which it is stored.  A good wine cooler will take these things into account.  You always want your wine to be stored so that it is horizontal, at the lowest, stable temperature possible, in a place that is free of vibration, and away from places where you store items that have a strong odor.

The ideal conditions for storing wine are at 50-55 degrees and 70% humidity.  A wine refrigerator or wine cooler is ideal for this task.  Unlike regular refrigerators, wine coolers run a little warmer maintaining the optimum temperature for wine.  Because they are electronic, their temperature never fluctuates, helping the wine to maintain its constant flavor.  They also offer storage options so you can lay the bottles down, allowing the wine to always stay in contact with the cork.  An under the counter wine cooler, built into your kitchen also offers extra protection from the natural light in your house.

When you go out shopping for a wine cooler, there are some things to look for.  You want to make sure that the door of the cooler is dark.  Try to avoid clear glass coolers.  They may look fabulous when they are filled with rows of wines glittering under the fluorescent lights of your kitchen, but all of the light that will seep in the bottles will ruin your wine.  When wine is exposed to too much light it creates a condition called being ''light struck''.  The result of this condition is that the wine ends up tasting like dry cardboard.

Another consideration when you purchase an under counter wine cooler is the location where you plan to install it.  Stand in the middle of your kitchen and take a minute to observe each spot under your counters that the cooler could potentially be placed.  Make sure you don’t install it near a stove or oven, which could affect its temperature.  Stay away from the refrigerator and the dishwasher because vibrations from both of these appliances will over time, ruin your wine.  Placing an under counter wine cooler near the sink also puts if too close to vibrations as water runs through the pipes.  If you have an island that has no appliances situated on it you have found the perfect location for your under counter wine cooler.

With the installation of an under counter wine cooler, you can serve wine to guests that came from your own ''cellar''.  Since a cooler will maintain the perfect conditions for storing your wine, your guests will never know you didn’t trek down a flight of stars into a darkened basement, sift through row after row of fine pinots to choose the perfect vintage, and chill the bottle to perfection just for

Tips On Choosing Your Next Bottle Of Wine

Tonight’s the night.  You’ve got that special dinner party with friends and you want it to be perfect.  You’ve got the menu completed but the question is which wine will compliment the meal best?  Here are some tips for choosing fine wine.

Lighter foods need lighter wines while heartier foods need full bodied wines.  For example, fish is light and thus a wine like Pinot Noir goes very nicely because it is also light.

The way the food is prepared will also influence the type of wine you choose.  Whether your meal is grilled or roasted as well as the spices you use will affect your wine choice.

Bitter foods need a fruity wine that will compliment it, such as a Chardonnay or Merlot.  Shiraz or some of the other heavy tannic red wines go great with a grilled steak because the fat in the meat tones down the bitterness in the wine.

Foods that are salty or oily go much better with a wine that’s higher in acid like Pinot Noir or Sauvignon Blanc.  Sweet foods do much better with a slightly sweet dry wine such as Riesling or Chenin Blanc.

Dry wines, both red and white, work well with a wider selection of foods so if in doubt go this route.  A general rule of thumb is that you want your wine to offer a nice contrast from your food but you don’t want it to clash.

The most important tip to remember is that wine is about taste and it’s a personal choice so trust your taste buds.  It’s always a good idea to test a wine before purchasing it, and don’t base your wine buying decisions on what your friends or family say.  Use your own palate to make your choices.

You should also be patient with yourself because learning to buy good wine has quite a learning curve.  The best way to learn is try many different wines and expand your wine cellar.  People tend to find a wine they like and then stick with it spending little time experimenting with other wines.  Why not explore other wines and find some other great choices?

The price of wine doesn’t dictate the quality.  Of course many would like you to believe it does but the British Columbia wine industry is proving that’s just not so, producing some top quality wines at a fraction of the cost of imported wines.  Of course, as with many things, best costs more but there are plenty of excellent choices and it really does pay to shop around.

Always put together your wine cabinet with thought.  Think about your budget, the types of food you most often serve, and how much entertaining you do.  Set aside the most expensive wines for those special occasions and serve the less expensive, but still delicious, wines for your daily use.

These tips for choosing fine wine will have your wine cabinet looking very healthy in no time and your wines will compliment your meals nicely!

Texas Wine -- Visit Wineries and Vineyards to Buy Various Texas Wine Gifts

Last few years have witnessed a growing popularity of Texas wine in the national as well as international market.  One of the biggest testaments to their growing popularity was Grapefest 2009, where over 240,000 people attended this fest and over 20,000 plus votes received for the 2009 Peoples Choice.  Grapefest is the largest wine festival in the state.  According to one estimate, Texas now has 87 wineries and is the 5th largest wine producing state in the nation.  Texans consume nearly 37 million gallons of wine a year and upon given a chance most Texans would prefer to buy a wine produced in Texas.  That clearly leaves a plenty of room for Texas wineries to produce an increasing share.  In addition to that there is a huge demand of Texas wine in the open market.

No doubt, wine has a great impact on Texans life because it generates revenue and employment.  During the year 2009, the wine industry generated $200 million along with 1,898 jobs for Texans.  And, now due to new legislation, you as a wine lover can enjoy wine direct from the winery of Texas.  Most of these wineries and vineyards encourage visitors to visit their vineyards and taste different wines before purchase in tasting rooms.  Not only this, but you can also buy different Texas wine gifts for your family or friends while visiting or tasting wines at their wineries and vineyards.

The Overall Scenario Is Fast Changing and Promising

Although, earlier there were many restrictions in the past, but during the last two decades Texas wine industry has seen a time of incredible growth.  In the last few years the number of wineries has increased from 50 to 87 or even more.  According to one estimate, currently there are around 20 more wineries that are pending for state approval bringing the number of wineries to 104.  Nowadays customers can directly place their orders with the winery and can also visit them to taste different wines in their tasting rooms.

And, there won’t be any exaggeration if we say that the day is not too far when these wineries will sell more wine over the Internet than in the tasting room in winter.  Moreover, people would visit these wineries and vineyards not just to see, taste and purchase wine but to buy different wines and other related gifts for special occasions such as Christmas, New Year and Thanksgiving.  Texans who visit a winery and make purchases in person can also have them shipped directly at their home.  Purchases of these wines and other wine gifts can also be made by phone, fax or online for shipment to a Texas package store for pick-up or further delivery.  So everything seems to be fast changing and promising especially when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Fine Wine Italian Style: The Beauty Of Italian Wine

Fine wine often brings to mind images of French rolling hills and elegant dinners;  however, Italy's twenty regions bring to the pallet an array of fine wines for your dining pleasure.

Italian wine making enjoys tradition rich in both modern and rustic methods, although much of the country's wineries now employ scientific and technological tools to create quality wines.  The country's wines are made primarily from two types of grapes, Nebbiolo and Sangiovese.  The Nebbiolo grapes are used in the northwester part of the country, creating the red wines Barolo and Barbaresco.  The Sangiovese grapes create one of the better-known Italian wines, Chianti, and are native to the central Tuscany and Umbria regions.

Italy's wines are divided into four categories based on origin, quality, and purity.  When shopping for a fine Italian wine, look for those with the designation of "Denominazione di Origine Controllata e Garantita D.O.C.G.," which is awarded to wines with a solid reputation.  This designation considers region, production yields, and a DOC of at least five years.  DOC indicates the origins of a wine, the type of grapes used in making the wine, and the methods of production.  DOCG is a designation following stricter guidelines than the DOC, which includes a guarantee of origin.

The five regions of the Northwest produce over a quarter of the country's DOC wines, but only about twenty percent of the country's total wine production.  This, then, is a good place to begin when shopping for Italian wine, as many wine sellers group Italian wine by the region, whether in general terms, such as Northwest, or by specific region, such as Piedmont.  The Piedmont region creates a number of DOC and DOCG wines.

The Northeast region is home to two of Italy's wine schools, and generates about a third of the country's DOC wines.  The three regions create about a fifth of Italy's total wine production.  Veneto, one of the regions, now produces the most wine of any region in the country.

Central Italy, comprised of six regions, accounts for about twenty percent of both wine production and DOC wines.  The tradition of wine making in this region has often been traditional, the region is moving toward more contemporary wine making methods, and the overall quality has improved.  Some wine experts believe that this region will continue to make great strides in wine making, so for those who love red wine, this is an area worth watching.  Tuscany creates the well-known Chianti wine, as well as a variety of other Tuscan reds.

The Southern region, which includes the islands, is comprised of six regions.  These regions produce about forty percent of the total production, but only about fourteen percent of DOC and DOCG wines.  The region is focusing on overall quality, and this, too, is a region worth watching.  For those interested in consistent quality wines, many of the region's production offer just that.

For those new to Italian wine or wanting additional information, there is an abundance of sources.  An importer specializing in Italian wine is one of the best sources for information on fine Italian wines, and can provide suggestions based on your individual preferences.  You can also do your own research and wine tasting based on your style and preference.  As with many things Italian, the wines are among the finer indulgences.