Being able to pair wine with food is an important and necessary skill, and to lack the skill could end up in embarrassment. It’s easy to pretend that your palate is refined enough to detect all the subtle flavors within a wine, and it is not likely that many people will care whether or not you understand the significance of tannins in a wine. Being able to pair wine with food, however, is a practical skill that is not easy to fake. Certainly, when you’re out on a first date in Buenos Aires, you don’t want to have to guess which wine goes best with your Parrilla. If you are hosting a dinner or wine tasting, your guests won’t be pleased if you serve food that is completely overshadowed by your Argentina Malbec.
So how do you know which wine goes best with which food? First of all, there are two ways one can go about pairing, by contrasting flavors or complementing flavors. These two methods are as simple as they sound. A wine that complements a dish will have similar characteristics to the dish. A wine that contrasts a dish will have characteristics that do not match the dish, but would enhance it. The characteristics of a wine that can either resemble or contrast a dish include flavor (earthy, fruity, etc.), flavor intensity (how potent or subtle), texture (whether crisp or soft), and weight (from light- to full-bodied).
Whether to use a complementary or contrasting wine, or deciding which characteristics to match or contrast, basically depends on preference. For a given dish, one could choose a select a number of different wines that would match well. Take, for example, a spicy, strong-flavored, Thai-food dish. To use a complementary wine, one might select a complex and full-bodied Chardonnay, which would match the flavor intensity of the dish. However, if one wished to smooth out the spiciness of the dish rather than accentuate it, they might choose a sweet Riesling.
So, clearly, pairing a wine with food requires knowledge of the flavors in your dish, the characteristics of various wine varietals, an acute understanding of what flavors go well together and what flavors contrast well, and maybe even a bit of creativity. Fortunately, if you lack these skills or knowledge, you are not out of luck. For many dishes, there is a sort of standard/recommended wine varietal to match. So, if you want to take the safer route to pairing wine with food, you could simply memorize what goes well with what, for which this is a helpful site: http://www.foodandwinepairing.org/wine_pairing_board.html. Of course, you could also take the more enjoyable route of mixing, matching, and testing pairs for yourself.
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