Sommelier Pairs Wine With 5 Classic Pasta Dishes

This is Lasagna Bolognese.

I think that's how you say it.

Real g's move in silence like lasagna.

I hope you guys know that.

Hey, I'm Sommelier Andre Houston Mack

and I'm gonna share with you the best tips

to pair any meal with the perfect wine.

Choosing the perfect wine to enhance your meal

only can make the meal taste better.

I'm gonna talk about a lot of things today

about what you're looking for in the dish,

what you're looking for in the wine

and what happens together when they come to you

like a perfect marriage.

But also you should throw all that out the window

if you like to drink rum and coke with your pasta.

But for those of you

and for the people who want to drink wine with food

and understand better how those two can go together

that's what today is all about.

All right, let's bring out the first dish.

I don't know why I did that.

I don't know, I was [laughs],

I was watching some wrestling last night.

This is Carbonara.

I know this dish all too well.

A favorite in my household.

I generally eat it cold.

I eat the leftovers off my kids' plates on the table.

You have the smokiness from the meat.

You have a thick pasta.

You have a creamy egg sauce and there's some cheese there.

You have to have some memory here

of what things taste like.

If you can just think about all of those flavors

then you can translate it into what you would like to drink.

Generally when I start

I try to do the whole bite, like a perfect bite.

But I might come in and dab a little bit on the sauce.

We have a little bit of pasta,

some guanciale here and get a little bit of sauce.

So guanciale,

really salty, chewy,

there's a crunchy texture to it.

A kind of lovely offset too

like this bouncy chew that you get from the rigatoni.

It's got this creaminess to it, lots of pepper.

So on the finish

I feel like the pepper is kind of lingering.

I'm looking for something

that has a little bit of acid in it

to kind of help cut through the richness of that

or something with a little bit of fruit on it

to cut through the saltiness of it.

Resetting your palate back to zero.

It's the best way to explain palate fatigue.

You chew a piece of gum for 45 minutes

and then all of a sudden you realize that

the gum has no taste anymore.

You take that piece of gum out,

maybe you put it on the side of a plate,

you talk for 30 or 40 minutes again,

and then you realize that the gum is there

and you pop it right back in your mouth

and like magic, it has some flavor.

It is not as flavorful as it was when it first started

but there is some flavor there.

To have a break in that and have a glass of wine

that kind of helps cleanse the palate,

to help you set up for the next bite.

To me, I think

that's what food and wine pairing is about.

Also, just when you look at food and wine pairing

you can either compare or contrast.

Comparing means pair like with like

and then contrasting where it's like with not like

so it's like a creamy sauce with

something a little bit more linear, high acid

to kind of help penetrate the richness of the sauce.

So I'm thinking of a red wine, high acid

that has some earthy characteristics to it

but also has some fruit.

So maybe a red wine, newer release, vintage.

Here we have the Chianti.

Chianti is actually a place in Italy

and the main grape here is Sangiovese

which is a high acid red grape,

I think pairs perfectly with this particular dish.

It has all the qualities that we talked about.

Pretty youthful, fruit forward.

As a wine starts to age, it loses some of its youthfulness

in that sense of the fruit starts to fade

and so you don't get a lot of the freshness

that I would like to think of

that would pair well with this dish.

Medium-bodied, a lot more fruit.

The sides of my tongue are tingling

which means that the wine is high acid

and I think I'm ready for another bite.

So all the saltiness and the cheese that I have at the end

kind of really kind of dissipate and it's like,

Okay, I'm ready for the next bite

and experience the dish like it's brand new.

This is Ligurian Pesto pasta.

This is trophy pasta here with a genovese style pesto

which is pine nuts, Parmesan, basil, olive oil, pecorino

and a little bit of cheese on top.

I would steer away from full body red wines here.

I think it would kind of just wipe out

a lot of the freshness and the greenness

and the beauty of this dish.

Definitely get basil, it's grassy

it feels very green.

Generally when I think about highly aromatic dishes,

something like this,

I want the wine to kind of mimic the same things.

I'm looking for a wine with acid, acid's an amplifier.

The reason why you put salt on a dish

is to really kind of heighten

and bring out the flavors of a dish.

This is comparing like with like.

So we want a wine that will mimic the style of this dish.

To me, I think when you match like with like

and they connect it resets the palate back to zero.

And how do you choose those styles?

A food and wine pairing.

If you want to do like with like or to do contrast

really think about the flavors in that dish

and start to go over in your head,

this is what it's gonna taste like

and I think that's an exercise that can help you

in the future in selecting wine.

I think I'm gonna gravitate Trebbiano d'Abruzzo.

So this is Italian white wine here

that embodies a lot of those attributes

that we talked about.

High acid, light to medium body, grassy notes,

very aromatic, floral and has some pretty decent acidity.

Generally speaking, in a restaurant setting

there's gonna be someone there

that knows something about the wine list.

There you can say what you're looking for.

You went through the dish,

mentally you went through and you said,

Well, I would like to try something

that's light to medium body, white wine,

that has some freshness to it,

and that's one way to kind of hedge your bet.

This is Lasagna Bolognese.

I think that's how you say it.

Sheets of pasta.

Bolognese, I believe is ground beef, pork and veal.

So there is a little bit of meat in the sauce here.

This is a bechamel sauce.

When I think of anything that's dense and heavy

I'm thinking of richer style wine.

A wine that's full-bodied

and that could be from grape skins,

that could be from where it's grown

and also that could be from tannins.

If we're thinking of a wine that spends quite a bit of time

in oak, anything grown in a warmer region,

generally those wines tend to be riper, fuller body.

And that's what I'm thinking about

when I'm thinking about dense food.

Now we could go on the opposite side.

When I think about lasagna I could do a Chardonnay,

which is basically a white wine

that's treated like a red wine.

It spends lots of time in oak,

a very rich, from a warm region Chardonnay

I think can also be a great pairing

for this particular dish.

First impression is like this sauce that's cooked down,

there's a meatiness to it, stewed tomatoes

and then you have cheese that comes in

that's kind of gooey to chewing down on the pasta.

This gives you lots of texture.

Man, I'm thinking like big old red here.

This is like a comfort dish in the heart of the winter.

If you have a fireplace or a fake one on your TV,

it's on right?

And you're drinking a great red wine with this.

Something that kind of warms you up in the inside.

So a little higher on the scale of the alcohol scale,

just kind of like a big hug.

So I selected the Barbera d'Alba from Italy.

It's just like an easy drinking fruit forward style wine

that I think that would be served well with this dish.

Now when I say easy drinking

I mean the wine is not high in tannin.

It doesn't need to spend a lot of time in the bottle

to age for those kind of tannins to to mellow out

and also makes the price approachable.

Ah, this smells amazing!

Right off the bat I'm getting licorice, black licorice,

a strawberry tart cherry,

it's a slight kind of peppery note to it.

Just very, very subtle

Ripe, fun, decent acidity.

But I think the fruitiness kind of is really gonna help

with this kind of rich dense texture that we have here.

Texture-wise, I feel like the body matches up.

I say it is like great for the saltiness of the cheese.

I think most people sit down and say,

I have this beautiful lasagna here

and I have one of my favorite wines.

No matter where it is in the world

it's red and I'm eating them together.

What could be better than that?

And to be honest with you,

nothing can be better than that in your mind

if that's what tastes great to you.

I think here trying to find the right wine

and the right balance just kind of takes the experience

to the next level.

This looks like Spaghetti and Clams.

All the clams are opened.

That's a good thing.

A white sauce and made with white wine.

The clam juice, all the briny juices from the clams,

a little garlic, parsley and chili flakes.

Yeah, I think the first thing I get

is the brininess from the clams.

So kind of like the waft of the ocean.

Then this freshness of greens and herbs

and then right at the end

it's this hint of heat from the chili fakes.

My biggest target is the aromats here.

I smell the ocean.

I'm thinking of a wine that would kind of mimic that.

A breeziness to it, an airiness to it,

that freshness to it that I get,

something that's mineral driven.

I believe this dish is from Campania.

So Campania is on the west coast of Italy,

but when we talk about coastal wines,

these are wines that are grown on the coast of a region,

but that coastal influence really helps

given these wines of brightness and the freshness to them.

Very hot days, growing the fruit

but also unique cool nights

to kind of really help the grapes maintain some acidity.

And that's really what you're looking for

when you're talking about food and wine pairing,

a wine that has some acid

and maybe here I would even look for a regional pairing

in that sense of just going through my mental Rolodex

to figure it out, Is there something on the wine list

that comes from this Campania area?

And here I wanna select the Falanghina and this is 2021.

So Falanghina is the grape.

This grape is indigenous to lots of parts of Italy

but it is grown in the area of Campania.

Little stone fruit,

little mirabelle plums, peaches, seashell, salty water.

There's a little bit of nuttiness to it

and then there's slate, salty rock if you will.

The things that I was looking for, minerality, acid

it has those but there is a tinge of the ocean of seafood.

There's a ripeness of fruit that's at the tail end

that I think that kind of match up perfectly

with the heat of the chili flakes.

If you served a wine that was too sweet with this dish,

the seafood, the brininess with sweet

would kind of be funky.

That's the one.

That's a good pairing.

So the next dish is

Orecchiette with Sausage and Broccoli Rabe.

Orecchiette I think means ear.

I don't know why I know that.

I think one of my kids told me that.

It's kind of shaped like an ear.

This is probably one of my favorite ones.

There's lots of different flavors in this dish.

Big flavors too like so you have Italian hot sausage

that's gonna bring the heat.

Even just the sprinkle of chili flakes brings the heat.

Broccoli rabe very fresh, grassy, earthy,

porky, spicy, definitely is a little something sweet

to the sausage as well, which I kind of like.

The earthiness and greenness of the broccoli rabe.

It's funny, I really wanted to go red wine here

but I really feel like that this could be

somewhere in the middle of the road of that.

The most flavorful thing in this dish is the sausage.

Generally, when you are looking at spicy food,

you tend to want to lead on something that

has riper fruit and ie sweet,

so maybe a low alcohol riesling,

that kind of foil or attack the spiciness.

So if we went in here with a high alcohol wine,

high alcohol wine and spicy tends to be not good at all.

All it does is it accentuates the heat in your mouth,

so it just makes it hotter.

Broccoli rabe,

so you think about bitter greens, grassy notes,

but I think bitter is the biggest component there.

And so when I think about bitter stuff, I'm thinking

something that has a little bit more riper fruit.

And when I say fruit for style wines

and what I'm saying is I'm not saying wines that are sweet

but they have this perception of sweetness

because there's riper fruit

and I think that always tends to work here.

Generally speaking, wines that are from the new world,

United States, North America, South America, Australia,

those tend to be fruit forward style wines

where they leave mainly with fruit.

Old world wines, things from Europe and stuff like that.

Those wines tend to lead more with savory notes.

I think for this dish for me, you know what I would love

and think that go well with this

is something that maybe a little bit unconventional.

It's not a red wine and it's not a white wine.

I'm actually picking something a little bit in the middle

and this is a rosé from the United States, from California.

This is Edmund St. John

and this is called Bone-Jolly and this is their rosé.

All of the things that I'm looking for the fruitiness

and those things of red wine,

the red berry notes and stuff like that.

It will have a little bit of tanning because of the skin.

I get that in this package in a rosé.

But also I get that kind of refreshness

of it being served chill and this kind of lightness

that you would get through a white wine.

And I think this would go perfectly with this dish.

A little bit of rhubarb, strawberry,

like a tartness of a raspberry, I'm gonna say asphalt

like walking over a freshly paved roadway.

The sausage kind of has a,

oh, it's got some fat in it

so it's really kind of coating my tongue

and it's all the heat at the end

and that's what I'm talking about at the end, no heat.

Heat's all gone, palate's pretty clean,

it's that whole thing of having the first bite

taste as good as the last bite.

I think that's why food and wine pairing work great

'cause it just sets you back to zero

and right at the beginning.

If you think your taste

and your preferences supersede anything that I set today,

these are some guidelines to hone your palate

and experience food and wine at a different level.

For those who want to,

I think just giving a little bit more care and thought

about it can only benefit you and your own experience.

And that's really truly what we're talking about.

This is about about you, food and wine.

So yeast come around and they eat sugar up

and then they kind of poop out alcohol.

I feel like I'm explaining to my kid. [chuckles]