Food and Wine Pairing for Fall

Wine for Normal People

Host Elizabeth Schneider provides a comprehensive guide to pairing wines with seasonal autumn foods like mushrooms, squash, and hearty meats

Key takeaways

• Effective pairing requires balancing food weight/texture with wine body and considering 'the ins' (sauces and seasonings).
• For mushroom risotto, earthy Pinot Noir or more tannic Nebbiolo varieties like Barbaresco help balance creamy richness.
• Sweet potato gnocchi pairs well with extra dry Cava to provide necessary acidity against cream and cheese.
• Pumpkin ravioli with sage and brown butter finds a perfect match in the honey and apple notes of Vouvray.
• When pairing spicy chili, choose wines with lower alcohol (under 13.5%) like Zinfandel or Malbec to avoid magnifying heat.

Main topics

• Autumn food and wine seasonality
• Wine pairing principles: weight and structure
• Mushroom and risotto pairings

Notable quotes

We should not be having wine without food.

Conclusion

A practical resource for wine enthusiasts looking to elevate their sea

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:08) Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it. Speaker 1 (0:15) I'm your host, Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and certified wine dork. This episode is brought to you by Grapes the Wine Company in White Plains, New York. You've got to go to GrapesTheWineCo.com. They're in New York. They have access to almost anything imported into the U.S. and they ship to 40 states. So no matter where you're listening from, they can probably get you what you want. Go online anytime at GrapesTheWineCo.com. Listen in the middle of the show for more details. I'm not done. a podcast on pairing in so long. I feel like I should probably do these more often. So my apologies. I think it's always very important, especially because I'm always saying we should not be having wine without food. And when I teach classes and talk to people about wine, I'm always saying that. Now, I think I'm very inspired by fall because like I've been seeing all over the interweb, everyone loves fall. I guess it's everyone's favorite season, not just mine. So we are officially in autumn. In the Northern Hemisphere, it's past the equinox. It's the spring equinox in the Southern Hemisphere. But in our hemisphere, autumn is upon us. The leaves have started to change. The days are definitely getting shorter. Cooler mornings and nights, yay. Cute fall clothes, boots, for those of us who love that kind of stuff. So we are here. It's also not just even for those of us who have kids going back to school. It does sometimes feel like after summer, which is sort of scattered, It's a return to normalcy. Even if you don't have back to school, it sort of feels like you're going back into your routine. It kind of makes you feel like it's a new year or a new time. And from a food and wine perspective, it generally means that we want warming food, cooked foods, soups and stews, comfort foods. And if we're following seasonality, root vegetables, squash and pumpkin, and then those warmer spices, cinnamon, ginger, clove, brown butter, things like that, and the warming wines or wines that are a little bit more warming with maybe slightly lower acidity with some earthiness to them just to mimic the season. And that is what I'm going to be recommending. And I'm going to offer... wines in red and white and occasionally rosé and sparkling where it fits. But I've picked out some major foods that are very fall-like. And of course, you can adapt these. Real quick, I need to remind you, come over October, we will do the first come over October free class. It will be streaming on my YouTube channel, Wine for Normal People. The first class will be basics of tasting. It's a very fun class. That's on October 8th. It's a Thursday. And then every Wednesday on Wine Wednesday, I will be doing a class. October 14th is food and wine pairing, which is a great follow-up to this podcast. October 21st, Wines of Italy and October 20th, Wines of France at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. questions throughout Wine for Normal People YouTube channel. I hope I will see you there. I'm excited to do these. And I'm doing this because... I want you all to find a reason to get together with your neighbor, your friend. Have a reason to have a couple glasses of wine with somebody or a glass of wine with somebody and bond and have some social time. That's what Come Over October is about. I'm working with the founders of Come Over October to do this. Please tell a friend, tell a neighbor. It's totally free. Also, please don't forget patreon.com slash wine for normal people. I'm going to start adding a couple new features, but there's already so much great stuff on there. Great discussion. and I am going to start adding wine suggestions to make it even more useful. So check it out today, patreon.com slash wine for normal people. We don't have enough people this week to do shout outs, but hopefully that will change next week. And wine for normal people.com slash classes. The wines of the Loire Valley is coming up and also building the blend, Grenache Sur Amavedra blends. Very fun class that will be. also in October. So check it out today, winefornormalpeople.com slash classes. And these are quite different from the free come over October classes. So maybe after you take one of the free classes, you'll be interested in those. They are intense, but super fun. What a great community. All right. If we're going to talk about pairing, I am going to go back to my rules of pairing. I do it in the food and wine pairing class. And if you've read the Wine for Normal People book, it's very involved about the pairing. I have a method that I always follow actually in my own head. In general, there's a couple of things that you really need to know, which is that we always pair something by weight, first of all. So how heavy is the wine? How heavy is the food? You want to make sure that that is done. That's sort of instinctual. I feel like we always can get that about right. I don't want something heavy. I'm having lighter food or I'm having something very heavy. So I want a bolder wine. That's something that I think a lot of people have a feel for. So that's the easy part. And it gets you in the ballpark of where we need to go. But if you first consider food, weight and texture, you get in the ballpark, wine color, wine type. The second thing is to think about structure. Now, I've just done two podcasts on the four elements of structure. So now you should know what that is. But you think about the wine structure, how it's going to react with the food. And we look at the four components of structure, acidity, tannin, alcohol, sugar, and how... they could react to a certain wine. For instance, really spicy food and high alcohol. Alcohol magnifies that spice. It makes it really, really hot. If you do sweet food with... tannin, it's going to make it taste really bitter and yucky. Surprisingly, acidic food and acidic wine makes everything taste smoother and rounder. Most people think it's really pleasant. So you think about the structure of the wine and the components in the dish. And then the final thing is thinking about the dominant flavors in your mouth after each bite. And this is not the main course, but the sauce or even the preparations of the sides. In this show, I'm really going to concentrate on sauces somewhat with the flavors of the base, but the important words are with and in. When I say withs and ins, I mean, what is the dish being served with? What are the side dishes? And the in is the sauce or the herbal preparation or the marinade. That is really the driver. All that the protein or the base gets you a lot of times is an idea of the weight and sometimes a little bit of the flavors because it can be earthy, it can be gamey, it can be sweet. But primarily, food is getting its flavor from those. ins, from the seasoning. That's where chefs really shine. It's usually not just the meat or the vegetable. It's what they've done with it. So in this show, we're really going to concentrate on the seasonings, the sauces, some of the raw materials. I will tell you that the pairing magic often happens in this step. So when you can match the flavors that you like in a wine with the flavors that you like in a food, you're going to find incredible success. And then, of course, there's some just general heuristics. What grows together goes together. Everybody always says that. Super important. And then if you're thinking about older wines, you definitely want to make that the star of the show. But in fall food and wine pairing, we're going to really concentrate on some of the seasonings and sauces. Like I said, the widths and the ends after we get the baseline of the weight, which is always how I do pairing at least. Now let's get to... the categories of fall flavors, and I'm going to start out with mushrooms. Mushroom dishes are very typical of fall. And I'll start out with risotto with mushrooms. This is arborio rice sauteed usually in butter, sometimes in olive oil, slow cooked in broth. You just keep adding broth until the risotto softens. You usually saute some onions or shallots or garlic and you put some white wine in so it has a little bit of a tang to it. And then add herbs, thyme and rosemary. And of course you add the mushrooms. At the end, you top it with Parmesan cheese. Mushrooms, especially seasonal fall mushrooms, cremini, shiitake, oyster, porcini. These are earthy, woodsy. savory umami flavors, those savory flavors. And these mushrooms have a very strong character. So the pairing need here, on the one hand, you have to have a wine that's going to balance that savory, creamy richness of the dish from the butter and from the cheese. And then you need a contrast that is going to lighten the dish up with acidity and a little bit of tannin to give some structure to the mushroom. You also need a flavor that's going to meet the mushroom notes. That can be subjective, but in my opinion, earthy notes often do very, very well with mushrooms, which is why one of the traditional pairings is Pinot Noir. People always recommend Pinot Noir with... Well, actually people recommend Pinot Noir for all of these wines, but Pinot Noir is a nice earthy wine. If you get the right kind, it should have some body. So look for 13 % alcohol or more, or else it could get lost in this very flavorful dish. And I'm especially saying that because I am recommending that German or Alsatian from Alsace or Burgundy versions, Burgundian versions are perfect for this particular pairing. There's some versions from New Zealand that could also work that are a little bit earthy. The thing that you need to look at here is the acidity. We need acidity that cuts the richness of the dish, some mild tannin that's going to temper those really intense umami notes, and something earthy that will complement all of the flavors. And an earthy Pinot Noir from the old world would absolutely