Getting Started With Food and Wine Pairing

August 1, 2016 Blog » Wine Tips & Tricks » Getting Started With Food and Wine Pairing



Complementary or Congruent Pairing


A complementary pairing creates balance by contrasting flavors.

A congruent pairing creates balance by amplifying compatible flavors.

The steps to pairing food with wine

  2. Identify the basic tastes in food and wine


9 Rules of Wine Pairing Know them before you break them

If you’re just getting started, you’ll find these tried-and-true methodologies to produce consistently great pairings. That said, as you get more familiar with different wines, you’ll become confident and can experiment breaking the rules! (Gamay with trout anyone?)

  1. The wine should be more acidic than the food.
  2. The wine should be sweeter than the food.


Identify The Basics Tastes

The blue lines show flavor matches and the gray lines show flavor clashes. Design is from Wine Folly: The Essential Guide to Wine


Basic Taste Components in Wine



  1. Red wines have more bitterness.
  2. White, rosé and sparkling wines have more acidity.
  3. Sweet wines have more sweetness.

Basic Taste Components in Food


Consider the intensity



  • Chardonnay has more body, but it’s usually not too acidic

Need more examples? 8 Common Wines and Their Taste Profiles

Finding Complementary or Congruent Pairings

smoked gouda mac & cheese. photo by Alla_G on flickr
Now that you’ve identified all the basic taste components in your dish, you can start playing around with pairing options. The simple example of the baked macaroni will offer up several possible pairings:

COMPLEMENTARY PAIRING: A white wine with high acidity will complement the fat in the macaroni. So, for example, a traditional mac and cheese recipe with a creamy béchamel sauce matched with zesty white wine such as Pinot Grigio, Assyrtiko or Sauvignon Blanc would create a Complementary Pairing.

CONGRUENT PAIRING: A white wine with creaminess will add to the creaminess in the dish. So, for example, a traditional mac and cheese recipe with a creamy béchamel sauce matched with a creamy white wine such as Viognier or Chardonnay would create a Congruent Pairing.

Getting creative with pairings

Once you create balance with the major taste components in both the wine and the dish, you can get creative by pairing the more subtle flavors. Here are some examples using variants of mac and cheese:

BOLD RED WINE: The ideology behind this pairing is that the high bitterness (tannin) will be balanced out by the salt and fat in the macaroni. This balancing will leave you with the remaining subtle flavors to pair with in the cheese and wine. So, for example, if your baked macaroni has smoked gouda in it, you might choose a Shiraz which also has smokiness in it (on the finish). The smoky flavors combine to create a Congruent Pairing while the tannin in the wine creates a Complementary Pairing with the fat in the dish.

SWEET WHITE WINE: The ideology behind this pairing is to bring out the sweet and salty flavors with a pairing. For example, a mac and cheese with ham would match well with a zesty white wine with some sweetness like Riesling. The acidity would create a Complementary Pairing to the fat and the sweetness would act as a Congruent Pairing to the ham.

Have you made an amazing food and wine pairing? Let’s hear about it! Leave a message in the comments below. Also, if there’s a food you’ve been stumped by, let us know about that too so we can help 🙂

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By Madeline Puckette