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Food
and wine matching: acidity is the key If you had to pick just one attribute that makes wines
suitable food companions, what would it be? Acidity, surely. For both
red and white wines, above all other characteristics it is good
acidity that enables them to partner a wide variety of food types with
some success, providing a useful foil for a variety of different
flavours. The problem here is that the modern style of ‘commercial’
wines so favoured by supermarket buyers – and increasingly by
punters, too – are fruit forward, low in acidity and with smooth,
soft tannins. These sorts of manufactured wines, with no hard edges
and a little sweetness from the fruit, are ideal for drinking on their
own, but they are average-to-poor food companions. The result? Further
distance between wines and the table: that is, the healthy culture of
wine being seen as a normal component of mealtimes is eroded yet more.
Wine is no longer seen as something that goes hand in hand with food,
which is a shame. It’s not just the commercial wine styles that are suffering
from a loss of acidity. The world’s most influential wine critic,
Robert Parker, has a reputation for favouring fine wines that are low
in acidity, and he’s not alone. Increasingly, ambitious winemakers
are moving to a rather monolithic (red) winemaking style:
concentrated, extracted, reasonably oaky with lots of slightly sweet
(sometimes over-ripe) fruit, and low acidity. These wines are
strikingly seductive when you first encounter them, but their appeal
can fade. The greatest danger is that sense of place is lost in this
winemaking style, such that there’s a real danger that in a
decade’s time it will be hard to spot the difference between fine
wines from Italy, France, Spain and California, for example. Where does acidity come from? Take an unripe grape and bite
into it. You’ll squirm at the tongue curling acidity. The flavour
will be dominated by the complex mixture of acids, which gradually
decrease as ripening proceeds, along with the rise in sugar levels
that takes place in the weeks before harvest. In an ideal wine-growing
region, and in a good vintage, by the time of harvest there will be
sufficient sugar in the grapes together with just the right levels of
acidity to produce a balanced wine. This doesn’t always happen: in
cooler wine regions the addition of sugar is common (chaptalization);
in warmer ones acid may need to be added.
There’s also the intriguing balance between sweetness and
acidity. Both are detected on by receptors on the tongue, but the two
can cancel each other out to some extent. Take two wines, both with
the same acidity, but one with just 1 g/l of residual sugar, the other
9 g/l: the latter will taste much less acidic. Conversely, a sweet
wine without sufficient acidity will taste cloying and syrupy.
Appropriate acidity to produce a balanced wine therefore depends on
more than just the acid component. An additional factor to bear in
mind is the presence of bitter or astringent components (typically
tannin), that will also affect the perception of acidity. In red
wines, ‘structure’ is contributed by both the acid and tannin; in
whites, it is almost always the acid alone, although oak may play a
role in wines that have been fermented and aged in new barrels. Where does this leave us? To create the potential for a good
food match, we are looking for wines that have plenty of acidity.
However, we’re also looking for balance: high acidity through
unripeness, or the addition of too much artificial acidity, is
unpleasant. Judging the right amount of acidity is difficult for the
winemaker because our perception of it is highly dependent on other
flavour components of the wine, and in particular sweetness. The
modern trend is one towards wines with low acid, and these wines
don’t make ideal partners for food, further distancing wine from the
table—which is where it has a great advantage over other alcoholic
drinks. published 03/10/02 |