The Best Wine To Pair With Tomato Sauce

Four out of five Nonnas agree – an Italian meal just isn't complete without a glass of vino. Wine is arguably as much a symbol of the old country as pasta or panettone, such a staple that much of Brooklyn is still dotted with grapevines planted by early Italian immigrants for at-home winemaking.

Apart from wine, the other cornerstone of Sunday dinner tends to be a big pot of marinara sauce, whether it's being used as the base for a meat dish or simply accompanying a bowl of spaghetti. If you enjoy serving your loved ones hearty dishes powered by the classic red sauce, offering your guests a wine that complements it beautifully is essential.

Your first guess might be to opt for an Italian red. This is a good start, but understanding the specific flavor notes of a good tomato sauce will help narrow down the options and find a wine pairing that enhances both the food and the drink.

Very broadly, pairing white wine with white sauces and red wine with red sauces is the right direction — not because of the color itself, but because butter- and cream-based sauces tend to pair better with lighter-bodied wines with enough acidity to balance out the fattiness, but not such overwhelming flavor that it drowns out the food's subtler notes. Red wines tend to be a little heavier in body, with strong and diverse flavor notes that can stand up to equally flavorful tomato sauce, which can be sweet, umami, fruity, herbal, and tangy all at once.

For some experts, the single most important quality of the wine to pay attention to is acidity. Tomatoes are a pretty acidic food (hence why eating a lot of them can cause canker sores), so you want to seek out wines with similar levels of acidity and avoid very full-bodied reds with a high tannin content or the heavy, woody flavors that come from aging in oak barrels. Tannins impart bitter notes, which can make for a lovely, complex bouquet of flavors in a glass of Bordeaux or Cabernet, but its pronounced bitterness will clash discordantly with zingy, acidic tomato sauce, and neither will taste as good as it ought to.

In terms of light-to-medium-bodied — tangy reds that are low in bitterness — a couple of varietals fit the bill perfectly. Barbera is a zippy, juicy Piedmontese red that experts like to pair with tomato and garlic — two key components of any marinara sauce. Chianti is the classic Tuscan red that, like Barbera, is highly acidic, but has more earthy, herbal, and even smoky notes. If you like something more on the dry side, an Etna Rosso from the peak of Sicily is still zingy but offers a little more in terms of earthy, bitter qualities that are subtle enough not to drown out the brightness of the tomato sauce.

But of course, you're not beholden to Italian varietals. Pinot noir is known as an easy fit for all sorts of dishes, and "new world" pinot noirs in particular — like those from California and Oregon — tend to pair brightly with tomatoes. Fruity Zinfandel typically has enough body and depth of flavor to work with meaty tomato dishes like bolognese, and wines from the Rhône region like Grenache and Syrah tend to offer fruitiness balanced with complex minerals or herbaceous notes. When pairing wine with tomato sauce, you have plenty of options — and if you have to slog through a few different bottles before you find your favorite, so be it. It's a small price to pay for (culinary) science.