Barbecue - wine

It is a fact that food coated in barbecue sauce, with its smoky, spicy, and generally rather sweet flavours, can present a real a challenge for the wine enthusiast. Too subtle a wine will be lost and wasted alongside the robust meats, but too overpowering a wine can make the food seem acidic, particularly if the sauces are tomato based.

Grilled meats, like steak, actually tolerate a wide range of reds, including young Cabernets, Zinfandel and any Shiraz from the New World. Beefburgers should also be fine with many reds, assuming the sauce with which the burger is served is not too hearty, but remember than old or complex wines will lose their subtlety when matched with grilled red meat.

There's one problem with red wines, of course. For many of us, barbecue season is the summer, and in hot weather, red wines lose their aromas, often seeming heavy on the palate, overly tannic and certainly not refreshing. Beaujolais, just slightly chilled, is a popular choice for those who do like to drink red wine with barbecue food.

On the other hand, you can focus on serving spicier foods which demand a mouth-cooling beverage, and choose between beer, mixed drinks and high acid white wines, such as Sauvignon Blanc, work very well with grilled flavours, particularly vegetables and shrimp, and is the best white wine with tomatoes. With pork, try Soave, the dry crisp Italian wine designed to be drunk with salami on summer picnics in Tuscany - it really cuts through the heaviness of pork and clears the palate of grease.

Dry rosé wines come into their own at grill time too, because they combine the crispness of white wine (and its ability to be served chilled) with special flavours that work well with grilled food, such as savours of tea, orange rind. Good choices come from Languedoc and Provence in France, and Rioja in Spain.

Barbecue wine photograph by Alisdair, used under a creative commons attribution licence.

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