Greetings VinoVossers, This Christmas, some of you have asked us how we come up with our food and wine pairing suggestions. Others might have asked yourself why the elves in Santa’s workshop have been given a raise to help with the increased cost of living. We can’t help you with the latter but this article may help explain the former.

Wine can pair with anything! (Photo: Walls.io, unsplash.com)

Here are some of the key factors we take into consideration when suggesting a wine pairing. Take advantage of this VinoVoss feature to find the perfect match to your Holiday meal! And don’t forget to take a look at our hand-picked wine selections for this Christmas!

Heat Is Part Of The Equation

Cooking is about the application of heat over time either directly or through another medium, like water, or wine. It is all about how hot for how long. More heat and longer cooking times lead to more flavor. Cooking in a tasty medium like wine adds more flavor compared to cooking in neutral water too.

The Fork In The Road To Balance

Everything is about balance but there are different ways to get there. You can take the complementary route, and create balance by grouping similar things together. Or, you can contrast and achieve balance by bringing the opposite together.

The Base Is The Beginning

At VinoVoss, we’re a contrastive bunch. On the food side, we start with the base ingredient. This is usually the word that you use to order the dish like fish, beef cheeks, or tofu. Every base ingredient has its own level of flavor; white fish, like sea bass, is subtler than tofu, which, like everything else, is overpowered by beef cheeks.

We simply use the variables like cooking time, temperature and medium to to scale the natural intensity of the base ingredient to figure out what sort of complementary wine we need.

Not All Grapes Are Equal

The base ingredient of wine is grapes but not all grapes are equal. Some are more like the neutral sea bass whilst others are like flavor packed beef cheeks. Grapes grow in different places too, with each location imprinting the local climate on the wine made there. A tomato grown in a greenhouse in Ohio just does not taste the same as one grown in southern California. The wines there taste pretty different too!

We use climate to scale up the natural attributes of a  base grape, or blend of grapes, so that we end up with a complementary pairing to the dish made of given ingredients that is cooked in a certain way.

The Magic Is You

Ultimately, what brings a wine and food pairing to life is VinoVossers, all of them. When we gather together to laugh, cry, eat, drink, watch football or Friends reruns, we add the final ingredient that brings it all together.

Share The Love This Christmas

Let us know how it goes. If you enjoy one of our wines this Christmas we would love to know about it. Take a picture and post it on Instagram with the hashtags #VinoVossVibes or #PourItLikeAVoss to share the love from our family to yours.

Merry Christmas from Team VinoVoss.