Which do you prefer

When hosting a dinner party for good friends, would you rather pick the wines you want to serve and then match the food to the wine or develope a menu and pair the wine to the food?

When hosting a dinner party for good friends, would you rather pick the wines you want to serve and then match the food to the wine or develope a menu and pair the wine to the food?

Either or. It all depends on what I intend to be the primary focus of the meal: when fresh morels were in season here, we'd craft a menu around them and find a wine to complement; when I'm pulling a treasured wine from the cellar, such as '83 Margaux, '82 Gruaud-Larose or '02 Huet LHL demi-sec, we'll figure out what food would best complement the wine.

Mark Lipton

Mark, I was thinking along the lines of a multi course dinner(6 to 10 courses), with wines paired with each course. In my situation, my wife puts together the menu and expects me to do the pairing. Sounds straight forward, light to heavy, dry to sweet, white to red. But she will often throw me curves in her line up,with courses that want a dry after a sweet etc. I was thinking about this as we sometimes eat at a restuarant where the chef says that he actualy picks his wines first and then pairs the food to it( its a single sitting prefixe dinner).

[Jenise]

Like Mark, it depends. But I will add that when all other things are equal, once upon a time when my cellar was smaller I tended to choose the wine and then match food to it. Now that my cellar can handle just about anything, I'm free to plan solely according to seasonal offerings and weather/mood influences first, then the wine.

[David M. Bueker]

I'm a wine geek first, so it usually starts with a wine I really want to serve. So I figure out a course for that wine. I then build the rest of the meal & pick out appropriate wines for the remaining courses.

I'm with Mark - it depends on where you want the emphasis. If you're trying to showcase a really lovely wine, then you want to be sure that you don't clobber with the food. OTOH, if you have something special to serve, then work the wine around it. We do the latter more often, for what that's worth.

I'm with Jenise on this one, again. Back when I only had a couple hundred bottles of wine, I would first carefully choose the wines I would like to drink and then build a menu around them. Now that I have way, way, way more bottles, I determine the menu by choosing seasonal ingredients, then go get the wines that work well with my menu from my cellar. It's one of the prime reasons I went through that long and painful process of building a cellar with depth and breadth of variety and vintage. It's so satisfying to choose my menu and know I will have wines to go with it

Both work.

I don't do many 6-10 course dinners at home so you may not want to hear from me!

But my standard entertaining process is a 3 course dinner plus aperitif. Since we don't eat meat the main course is usually fish, although for some of our 'real' vegetarian friends it can shift to completely fleshless. So we have a standard repertoire of dishes and concepts that change depending on mood or seasonal vegetables etc. And I usually don't get too anal about food matches. If I'm serving Northern Rhone syrah with the main course I may use olives in the sauce for the fish. But actually I've used similar sauces for Burgundy. Your menus sound a lot more precise.

However, earlier this week we had some people over and the main course was halibut with roasted tomatoes and olives and I declined to serve a Chinon I wanted to drink because I didn't think it would match. For me, that was pretty precise! (I usually ballpark things and try to avoid outright clashes but more-or-less eat and drink what I want to eat and drink)

Almost always I plan my menu first and then look to my cellar.

Personally, I plan the menu first, then choose which wines to pair. Even when I eat out, I think of what I want to eat, then choose the restaurant and the wines after.

I am in accord with Noel on this. That is to way whether at home or when dining out to first select my menu and then to pair the appropriate wines. The exception is when I have guests and want to highlight one or more wines, and then I will first make up the order of wines to be served and only then consider the dishes to match.

Best
Rogov

Hi,

Either or. It all depends on what I intend to be the primary focus of the meal: when fresh morels were in season here, we'd craft a menu around them and find a wine to complement; when I'm pulling a treasured wine from the cellar, such as '83 Margaux, '82 Gruaud-Larose or '02 Huet LHL demi-sec, we'll figure out what food would best complement the wine.
Mark Lipton

Exactly. Typical Lipton common sense.

Also, IMO, planning a meal at home has little to do with what one does at a restaurant. At home, one usually has a pretty good idea of the wines, and with luck, have an idea of what they taste like and what you feel they'll go with. As it happens I'm fairly manic about trying as much as possible to cook in season. So there's little point in planning a meal round wines that cry out for - say - game at this time of year, where game is out of season and honestly not too appropriate. For me (not everyone will agree) this time of year says lamb, salmon trout, asparagus, strawberries. So I feel it would be perverse to choose to taste wines that call out for pheasant, oysters, red cabbage and apple pie.

I've hosted meal for friends who wanted to put on a comparative tasting of '66 Pauillac wines.Clearly at a meal like that, the wines are the primary focus and I'll try to make sure that at least two of the courses will make them shine. Equally, when we wanted to do a tasting of lesser '61 Bordeaux at the Tate, we chose the food to complement the wines. But more generally, I'll decide on a menu that hits the spot for me and then choose the wines to go with it.