The Secrets of Matchmaking

Getty Images Just in time for the stickiest days of summer, here's a master class in matching great wines with the season's hardest-to-pair ingredients.

Remember that dopey ad where two girls are shoveling in yogurt, going back and forth, "Mmmm, this is 'fitting-into-your-skinny-jeans' good!"? I have nothing against yogurt, but the amount of pleasure expressed by these women as they enjoyed their yogurt seemed disproportionate to many of us.

“The first step in (wine) pairing is often to eliminate things you don't want.”

Here's the segue: the discovery of a perfect summer wine; now that's a topic worthy of lots of back and forth self-congratulatory badinage. But even those of us who know a little something about wine can easily get stumped when it comes to matching it up to dinner. And if you take into account some of the more notoriously tricky foods to pour against, it's time to use a lifeline, and phone-a-friend. The friend I phoned is Ryan Ibsen, who is the Wine Director at Pasanella & Son, Vitners, on South Street in New York City. His mission, which he chose to accept, was to take 5 summery recipes, and pick a great wine to go with each. The second part of his mission was to explain to me why he chose what he did. And then I thought, while I'm cooking and phoning friends, I'll phone a few more, because two people is a thoughtful wine and food tasting, but 6 people is an educational excuse for a tiny party at 5:00 on a Wednesday night. The dishes were picked and prepared, the wines selected, and we congregated before our wine sensei.

We began with an extremely stripped-down tomato bruschetta, essentially all about the tomatoes, which are of course having their 15 minutes right now. Tomatoes are acidic, and Ryan explained that the first step in pairing is often to eliminate things you don't want: in this case, overly acidic wines. Here he wanted softness and juiciness and picked a rosé, Cataldi Madonna Montepulciano d' Abruzzo Rosato 2008. First we spent a slightly reverent moment holding up the glass, admiring the color, with Ryan pointing out "the punked-out color combo" of the dark pink of the wine against the bright red of the tomatoes. We sipped, we bit, we were happy. Ryan said that a dish this simple isn't all that hard to pair against, but that what you would look for is clean, simple, soft, elegant, and not aged in wood. The operative word was fresh. He picked this particular Rosato because it was "elementally simple" like the bruschetta itself.

We then spent a few minutes talking about wine categories that have been killed by one bad seed. White Zinfandel screwed rosé for a long time (at least in this country), boxed wine and those big jugs of crappy California whites crushed Chablis, and Riesling could barely be resuscitated after Blue Nun mowed it down in broad daylight.

But, this was no time for whining. We had a lemon and spinach salad to eat. This salad didn't have lemon juice in it, but rather little nuggets of actual lemon fruit, peeking out between baby spinach leaves, and ribbons of fresh mint. Again, some olive oil and salt, and that's all she wrote, in terms of ingredients. The challenge here: lemon AND spinach. The wine was Ronco del Gnemiz Sauvignon 2007 from Friuli. This was an Italian Sauvignon Blanc, with lots of minerality and a little new oak. Ryan explained: the citrus of Sauvignon Blanc plays off lemon and lime well, but the oak roped in the earthiness of the spinach. The combo of Sauvignon Blanc and oak apparently is pretty rare, so a real balancing act, this pairing. And apparently this wine not only drinks well today, but ages well, too. And for those of you keeping score, this wine is not just organic, but "hyper-organic," says Ryan. What amused me was the fact that the grapes were "gently pressed in a pneumatic press," which I now understand isn't meant to be funny at all.