When you’re creating your menu and wine list, one common tactic that many restaurant owners recommend is suggesting good entrée and wine pairings. Unfortunately, there’s no perfect set of rules to account for everybody’s individual tastes. However, if you’re wondering how to create wine pairings for your restaurant’s menu, here are a few helpful tips that you must keep in mind to find a dish’s best complement.
Balancing Sweet and Salty
Salty dishes pair nicely with sweet or semi-sweet wine, so we recommend considering these flavor profiles when trying to create a good pairing. This pairing helps balance out the two more extreme flavors, and often, guests find that a touch of saltiness in their meal enhances the sweetness of the wine. Knowing how to balance these flavors is a large part of improving your guests’ winery experience.
Darker Wines for Darker Meats
One of the basic rules for creating wine pairings for your restaurant’s menu is knowing the differences between red and white wines and how they work with different meat options. Red wine doesn’t work well with fish because the light, flakey texture of the fish often clashes with a full-bodied red. Meanwhile, a cowboy ribeye is a heavy steak and will need something equally bold and powerful, so a sparkling white wine doesn’t match.
Different Rules for Dessert
The rules of pairing wine with an entrée are usually easy to follow as long as you pay attention to the body of each wine. However, pairing wine with dessert comes with a different set of challenges. Typically, sweeter wines pair best with dessert. This differs from having to balance out the sweetness with a heavier sense. When in doubt, sparkling wines are excellent options for lighter desserts, like cheesecake or anything with fruit, while red wines pair well with chocolate.
