What wine would you pair with grilled kebab?

Wine pairing for grilled food presents unique challenges. The cooking process introduces flavors of smoke and, perhaps, char. There might be sweet or fruity sauces and a wide variety of foods being grilled.

I recently wrote an extensive article on how to pair wine with your favorite grilled foods for JJBuckley.com. The article starts with tips and general recommendations. Then it goes into specific pairing ideas for twelve different types of grilled food. I’ve offered three categories of pairing—fruit-forward wines, savory wines and adventurous wines—for each type of food. Every pairing category includes multiple wine suggestions.

Here are two samples from the article:

Are you getting saucy?
When pairing wines with food, sauces and side dishes are often more important than the protein. This is certainly true for grilled meals. Typical add-ons, such as BBQ sauce, fruit-based glazes and even ketchup, are sweet. So too, baked beans and some cole slaws. Sweetness in foods kill the fruit in wines which lack residual sugar – that can make the wine very unappealing. As a general rule, wines should be as sweet, or even sweeter, than the foods they are paired with.

Below are suggested wine pairings for grilled foods. In each category, I offer recommendations for fruit-forward wines which will contrast with the food, savory wines for matching bitterness, and, for the adventurous, less well-known wines and pairings to have fun with.

Wine pairings for grilled chicken (dark meat)
Fruit-forward wines: Santa Barbara County Pinot Noir; New World Chardonnay; Beaujolais (not from Morgon, Moulin-a-Vent or Julienas); Zinfandel

Savory wines: New Zealand Pinot Noir; Cote du Rhone

Adventurous wines: Blaufrankisch, St. Laurent and Zweigelt (Austrian reds somewhat similar to Pinot Noir but more savory and spicy); Trousseau Gris from Sonoma County; Qvevri-aged Rkatsiteli from the Republic of Georgia (slightly oxidized, tannic white wine with flavors of walnuts and apricot)

I hope you’ll check out the article before you fire up the Weber next time. And please let me know via comments what your favorite wine pairing for grilled food is.

Copyright Fred Swan 2016. All rights reserved.