Finding the Perfect Wine for your Salad Choice

You are having a fantastic party at your house, complete with a full course meal, salad, dessert, and of course, wine. Your guests arrived on time; you started the music to create the right atmosphere. You start serving the wine, and before you know it, everybody is enjoying themselves in the party conversations between acquaintances over a delicious glass of wine.

After a while, you start to serve the magnificent meals that will make your guests hungry and wanting for more, and of course, you also serve the wine that is appropriate for the meal.

The guests just finished eating and are now having their desserts served, along with a salad for some of the guests. But you are just now realizing if the wine can fit perfectly with the mixture that is being served to the guests. You wished you have spent more time thinking about the pairing of the salad and wine as you slowly panic and nervously ask some of your guests if they find the salad and wine pairing well.

To avert this kind of unfortunate situation, you need to think more of the complexities of pairing these two varying culinary wonders. There are a lot of factors that need to be considered if you want these two to fit perfectly. If you consult the internet for suggestions, you could find that salad and wine blend well in fact that there are a lot of suggested pairings for the two.

Now, you ask yourself how would you know if a particular wine blends well with your chosen salad. There are a few tricks to that actually, and fortunately for you, they can be quite simple if you know your wines well enough.

Acidic Salad

Acidic food tends to usually make a wine bland and tasteless, preventing it from doing its job in refreshing your palate in every bite of food. Sauvignon Blanc, a crisp wine that is a classic salad pairing can help you as its acidity helps balance out the taste of the salad. 

Keep in mind though that the bitterness not only comes from the salad dressing but also to the ingredients used in the mixture. As you know, salad typically consists of tomatoes, green veggies, fruits, or beets. Certain dairy products also come into play like cheese and milk.

Main Course Salad

If you have a salad as your main course, the main toppings would typically have protein like fish, roasted vegetables or meat, as the green leafy veggies are the ones getting dressed in this type of salad. With that being the case, it is generally a good idea to match the wine the main topping, which in this case, vary from heavy to light.

With the salad having meat components, it is best if you look for the standard wine pairing suggestions, as you could take care of the parts of the green later and focus more on how to pair the wine with the meat. If you have red meat for the main component of the salad, going for a deep red wine would be the right decision. Try having Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc for this and as for fish and other light meats, having a white wine will be best to pair with it.

You need to look into the wines themselves to be further associated with them and to have an idea of what wine would be the best pair to your chosen salad.

If you are going with the acidic kind of salad, there are a lot of wines out there that would be a perfect pair for it. As you know, you need a wine that has the same amount of acidity to balance the salad itself. The wine that would be good for this is Pinot Gris, Sauvignon Blanc, Grenache, Barbera, Chenin Blanc, Riesling, Sancerre, Muscadet, or Cote Rotie Wines.

Most of the acidic salads out there get their fill of acidity from the vinegar. While it is common practice, you could also opt for lemons. With lemons, you can still have the sharpness that you want, but not as harsh as balsamic vinegar. Some wines have a lemon taste to them too, so having a lemony freshness on your salad can have both the wine and the salad acquire harmony in the palate.

Takeaway

There are a lot of salads in the culinary industry, and frankly, finding a perfect wine for each of them would be bothersome. Do not let it stop you, though, as you can still experiment with a lot of varying wines in the market. The most crucial factor in blending wine and salad should be harmony and balance as with them, and the pairing would be a great bliss on your palate.

Real Time Analytics