Food & Wine Pairing

IntoWine asked our panel of experts to share their recommendations for the best wine to pair with a tomato & mozzarella (Caprese) salad: Laraneta Sangiovese ($25). Ripe with raspberry, pomegranate, oak and wood notes this is another success from this small family owned winery located near Paso Robles. Simply put, their wines are just great to drink and taste wonderful. A long finish and a mild spice, it holds up against the acidity of the tomato and compliments with soft timid cheese. This wine is compelling and I usually lean toward an Italian wine with Italian food. One of the great hallmarks of a great wine is how quickly you tend to consume it; this sangiovese is deceptively good and will disappear from your glass too quickly. - Michael Cervin , Wine Judge, Restaurant Critic, and IntoWine Featured Writer

I had the pleasure of having my sister-in-law visit my wife and I yesterday, and generally whenever we have someone over to the house, I take the opportunity to cook a nice meal. Unfortunately, the primary reason for my sister-in-law’s visit was not actually to see my wife or I, but rather our new 3 month old daughter…and food was not top of mind. Additionally, the afore mentioned daughter isn’t the greatest of sleepers, I was exhausted, and didn’t really feel like cooking anyway. So….we ended up ordering Thai food.

I think Port is an underappreciated wine. At least in my life, I’ve always restricted it to dessert wine, and not being a dessert person, the bottles I acquired tended to sit around in my wine cabinet to gather dust and “age”. But, about a year ago, a friend (let’s call him John) at work called me over to his desk, pointed to an open bottle of port and a glass (fortunately he doesn’t operate heavy machinery) and asked me try his “…favorite $20 bottle of port, the best deal around”. The wine tasted very nice, but what interested me more than the flavor, was the way he thought about Port.

From apps that let you choose the type of wine, so it can choose the best food pairing, to apps that list just about every possible wine pairing for brunch, ethnic, foods and more, the 4 food & wine apps on the following list can do it all. At prices ranging from free up to $3.99, it might be worth it to add all of them to your arsenal.

Patagonian toothfish? That’s the real fish behind the so-called Chilean sea bass, not even in the bass family. Marketing geniuses correctly believed their coined name might make the fish more desirable. Authentic sea bass has firmer, denser flesh than its mimic, and comes in several versions: black sea bass appears in Chinese cuisine, red and black groupers are used in Latin countries’ cooking, white sea bass tends to come from Mexico and Hapu’upu’u hails from Hawaii.

I never knew that The HoneyBaked Ham Company had the monopoly on honey-baked hams for many years until spiral cutter inventor Harry Hoenselaar’s patent finally ran out in 1981. At that point other companies, such as Smithfield, joined the game. These other companies used cutters based on the same principle as Hoenselaar’s, creating one continuous slice around the bone. However, Hoenselaar wasn’t only known for the cutter, but he also devised a secret marinade, smoked each ham for hours over assorted hardwood chip types, then sealed the ham with his sweet, signature glaze, resulting in a crunchy, crackly wrapper. The Honey Baked Ham Company started in 1957 as one store in Detroit and has grown to over 400 stores run by his children and grandchildren.

“Mama Mia – that’s a spicy meatball!” – the exclamation leads to the belief that the fare hailed from Italy, but the origin of the meatball and the spaghetti and meatballs dish is unclear. We know that generally, households used leftover or unused parts of meat with day-old bread or bread crumbs to stretch their use over several days. The now-popular spaghetti and meatballs meal seems to have originated in the United States, as Italians normally did not make a practice of serving meat with their pasta, rather, they would cook meats and use the sauce from the meat to cover their pasta, a way of stretching their own meals.

With the holidays just around the corner, many of us are planning menus, shopping for groceries and ordering centerpieces. Choosing wines to pair with traditional holiday foods is an important part of the menu planning process. If you're roasting a turkey to serve with all the trimmings or dishing up a flavorful ham, you might wonder which wines work best with your menu selections. IntoWine.com asked some wine experts for their red and white pairing recommendations.

Overcooked, battered and abused? No longer. Americans tended to eat less lamb than any other red meat, but consumption has come up bit since younger chefs traveled to discover its intense, interesting flavor and learned the correct way to cook the meat. Finer restaurants have been released from their fears that guests will reject a lamb dish now that it is properly prepared. This influence, coupled with the flood of immigrants who serve lamb as a staple, has greatly increased the popularity of the meat, particularly lamb shanks, in this country.

A popular appetizer for a reason, crab cakes maintain numerous enthusiastic followers. Two innovators, Tom Douglas and Shelley Lance, even wrote the book: I Love Crab Cakes! 50 Recipes for an American Classic . An ongoing battle rages over who produces the best examples in Baltimore, but others swear by those hailing from the Carolinas.