The acid test: how to find a sharp wine to suit your palate

 

The acid test: how to find a sharp wine to suit your palate

Palates vary depending on culture, familiarity and diet, among other things, so that’s worth bearing in mind when pairing wine with food
 

 

Reds such as chianti and albarossa are quite high in acidity, which works especially well with Italian food.’ Photograph: Rawpixel/Getty Images/iStockphoto

The other day, I was chatting to a couple who import food products from Lebanon and they remarked that a lot of people found their pomegranate molasses too tart. But in fact, theirs is a more authentic product than many we get in the UK, made for Lebanese tastes rather than British ones, and designed to give dishes, especially meat-based ones, a lift. I liked it a lot, but it underlined how much people’s palates vary. I generally like drinks that are high in acidity, say, but if you’ve got a sweeter tooth, you may not. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You’d never condemn anyone for liking cake more than cheese, after all. That Lebanese example also suggests that it may also be a question of where you come from and what you’re used to. Italian wines, for instance, are not notably fruity and, in the case of reds such as the chianti and the albatross in today’s pick, quite high in acidity, which works especially well with Italian food.

It also depends on what you’re eating. If an ingredient is salty or pickled, for instance, it’s going to accentuate the sweetness in a wine, maybe to an extent that’s not comfortable for you, which is why really dry wines such as muscadet, Picpoul de Pinet, chablis, and albariño work so well with saline shellfish such as oysters and clams.

If you’re sensitive to sharpness, meanwhile, you can still enjoy wines that are characteristically tart, just so long as you go for a more rounded, fruitier one: New Zealand sauvignon blanc, with its lush, passion fruit character, for example, rather than a sancerre, while Provençal rosé is actually quite dry and crisp, but has a creaminess and delicate fruitiness that offset that; oak ageing will also mellow and round out a wine, while sweetness, as is common in riesling, will counterbalance it. On the other hand, if you relish the taste of sharpness and sourness, look for descriptors such as “crisp” and “refreshing”.