How To Combine Wine With Your Meals

Some General Hints on Wine

Keep your red wines at room temperature, especially before serving, since they are at their best this way. White wines are best when they cool, but not iced. If you offer sherry as an aperitif, you can serve it at the beginning of the meal with the hors d’oeuvre or with a soup.

Wine in the kitchen

If like the French, you enjoy cooking with wine; add the wine to other ingredients at a later stage of cooking, rather than early. In this way, you can ensure that the goodness and savor of the wine does not boil away. If you are making a sauce with wine, ensure that the process of reduction of the wine is slow and gentle.

Cooking wines

Not all wines lend themselves to cooking. Two main wines you should have on hand for cooking are a white Burgundy, and a red Burgundy. A drier white wine is useful if you want to marinate fish or make a fondue. If you are making desserts with wine, Marsalas should be your choice. Marsala wines do flambé jobs quite well. A last minute dash of dry sherry will improve a clear soup.

Most probably, you will not cook with wine on a large scale, so buy wine for cooking in half-bottles. If an opened bottle of wine is left standing about in a warm room for a long time, it will eventually go sour. You can also add a miniature bottle of inexpensive brandy to your collection of cooking wines. Brandy is good for flambéing crêpes (pancakes).

Wine with your meals

You may not cook with wine, but you do like drinking wine with your meals. A white Burgundy should be your choice for a fish course. The German white wine Liebfraumlich or a Moselle or dry Graves would work equally well. These wines will also go well with chicken or turkey. An alternative would be Claret ( a red Bordeaux such as Pomerol or St. Emilion.) A Médoc or red Burgundy is also good.

Most people have Claret or red Burgundy with duck, goose or roast meat, but a white wine goes equally well. Use sweet Sauternes for your dessert, or a sparkling Burgundy. If you are like the French, and must have some wine even with your coffee, choose a “full-blooded ’ wine, like a port wine, Marsala**,** Madeira or a sweet sherry.

Brandy is the liqueur usually served after dinner. You can also serve a Crème de Menthe or Drambuie.There are also fruit flavored brandies such as apricot, peach and cherry. The coffee flavored liquor Tia Mara is also quite popular as an after dinner drink or digestive.

The benefits of wine

The French have not only drunk wine for enjoyment, but they have known the benefits of wine for ages. Now scientists are revealing more and more, that including wine in one’s daily diet can be particularly good for heart health. Moderate use can also help to prevent certain diseases such as diabetes, stroke and cataracts. It is important to note however that the benefits of wine can only be achieved if it is drunk in moderation.

Beneficial effects can turn negative, if wine is drunk in excess, like that of any other form of alcohol. Your liver is the organ which usually suffers most from negative effects. In drinking wine for health benefits, try to limit your consumption to one glass a day.