We can identify hundreds of fragrances, but we can only identify several flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, greasy and umami. Umami is a substance called glutamate that our tongue feels, and the best example is monosodium glutamate. Many foods have obvious flavors, such as soy sauce, tomatoes, spinach, mushrooms, cold cuts, meat and so on. Umami is really a big problem in wine catering, which is very challenging.

Prepare food

In order to fully reflect the matching effect of wine and food, it is necessary to prepare 8 kinds of foods with different tastes, 2 kinds of sauces and 4 kinds of different wines. When preparing food, it is best to choose the most basic food that best represents this taste, such as using salted potato chips to represent salted vegetables. Vegetables can be selected according to personal preference. The following are eight foods we recommend for reference only.

Umami: potato chips. Make sure the potato chips are salty, well preserved and not expired.

Acid: vinegar. You can taste simple red wine with vinegar salad.

Bitter taste: walnut. Walnut is a common food in tasting.

Greasy: cheese.

Sweetness: jelly. Try to make a dessert with sweet jelly and wine.

Umami: steak. Spread red wine sauce and mayonnaise on the steak.

Green vegetables: spinach. When frying spinach, put some butter and salt.

Spicy: Dip some hot sauce in the potato chips.

Prepare wine

It is best to prepare different types and styles of wines, such as red wine, white wine, sparkling wine and sweet wine. You can choose the corresponding representative wines, such as malbec, Chardonnay, Pink sparkling wine (any sparkling wine that can produce bubbles) and Chenning Bailang. It is mainly recommended that these wines are common in supermarkets. Of course, the final choice of wine depends entirely on your hobbies, and there is no hard and fast standard.

Taste test

After preparing food and wine, you can try to match and taste each food with each wine. If you want to remember their feelings after collocation, you can take notes to see if their collocation is poor, poor, average, good or excellent (it can be expressed by the number 1-5). It can be divided into five steps:

Take a bite of food, chew for a while, drink a little wine, and then swallow it.

Record their collocation (which grade belongs to 1-5), or take notes on wine tasting.

Repeat this process until all the food and all the wine are tasted together.

Try to mix several foods with your favorite wine.

Enjoy it slowly!

Finally, I want to remind you that there is no standard answer to this question. Everyone has different hobbies and tastes. As long as you feel good, it is the most suitable for you.