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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 |