The Worst Type Of Wine To Order With Spicy Food

Learning to pair food with wine can make your dining experience nicer, especially if you are going out to eat for a celebration or on a date. Pairing the perfect wine with your food creates a balance of flavors and ensures that you get the most from both your food and your drink. It may sound hard to do, but choosing the right wine for the food you plan to eat can be quite simple, once you understand the basics.

According to Wine Folly, there are a few rules for creating great wine and food pairings. For example, the wine should be more acidic and sweeter than your food. Red wines go great with flavored meats, white wines are wonderful with fish dishes and like orange blossom salmon. Of course, you can follow the many rules of how to pair wines with food for the best experience, but how do you select the right wine for spicy food? And would you even want to have a glass of wine with one of the spiciest dishes in America?

To understand how to select the right wine for when you are eating spicy food, you first need to know about congruent pairings, which help to create balance by enhancing and amplifying shared flavor compounds in the food and wine, like a sweet wine that is paired with a sweet dish, per BACKBAR. You should also know about complementary pairings, which BACKBAR says complement each other even though they do not have similar flavor compounds. This means they create a balance in the way they contrast, such as sweet wine with spicy food.

In an interview with The Takeout, Tom Lillard, a sales representative for Pure Wine Company, says that sweeter wines, like Moscato, "balance the spice in your food." But, he notes that the worst wines to pair with spicy foods are those that have a high alcohol content because alcohol enhances the spice. DCanter suggests that you choose something like a sweet Riesling or Gewurztraminer to create a complementary pairing with spicy dishes.

There are many sweet, low alcohol content wine options available. You can choose a good Chenin Blanc, or even a Rosé, which Vino Vest notes are on the low alcohol side, so they won't increase the punch of the spicy food. If you like that slightly painful feeling that is caused by eating spicy food, you can choose a sweet wine with bubbles, such as Moscato d'Asti, Lambrusco, or sweet Champagne.

If you prefer red wines, you're in luck with pairing them with spicy foods. According to Vivino, full-bodied red wine that has a high alcohol content actually works great with spicy meat dishes because they create a congruent pairing. If you want to go with something lighter, the site recommends a Sauvignon Blanc for spicy food but warns that it won't be as good a pairing as a dark red wine or a fruity, sweet wine.