WHITE WINES CAN JUMP—AND BE BETTER THAN RED WITH FOOD
Red wines get your attention; white wines request it. Red wines deliver; white wines entice.
It took cheese to teach me how good white wine is.
When you travel, you notice that more people drink white wine with their cheese than red, unlike us. There’s nothing wrong drinking red wine with cheese; it’s just, to be blunt, stupid. Most of what you want (and have bought) in a red wine—its substantial flavors, texture and heft—is blocked from your appreciating it by especially the fat in most cheese.
More people drink white wine with their cheese because white wine has so much less to lose than a red wine in the encounter. Also, the way white wines are made up—with generally higher acidity than most reds, often a small amount of residual sugar and with low alcohol—makes them a more successful partner with the milk sugars, fat and salt of most cheeses.
You also might notice on your travels that older wine drinkers, especially experienced wine pros such as wine writers, restaurateurs and sommeliers, winemakers and wine merchants, tend to gravitate toward drinking more white wine than red. They are, for example, among the more robust champions of Riesling as the world’s greatest white wine grape. And they are inordinately fond of Champagne.
The subtlety, the simplicity of line, the nuance—all of these tickle white wine aficionados, with or without their cheese. You might hear a winemaker of many years say that he or she finds it more difficult to make good white wine than it is to make red. White wines show mistakes or flaws, or poor winemaking choices; reds can get away with more. White wines are, in more than one sense of the term, transparent.
No issues here: red wines are delicious; that’s their job. White wines, however, often can do more with less.
Except for pinot noir (assuredly) and syrah (perhaps), white grapes better translate the voice of the vineyard into a wine with great precision and clarity. Winemakers in the Loire talk incessantly of their soils, whether sand, quartz, chalk, limestone or flint, and of how their white grapes reflect these terroirs.
Red wines get your attention; white wines request it. Red wines deliver; white wines entice. You can chew many a red wine; you can chew on many a white.
Photo by Celina Albertz on unsplash.
Read more about How White Wine is Made.
And here's the skinny on the white wines made from Riesling, Chardonnay, Viognier, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Gris/Grigio, Sémillon, Gewurztraminer and Chenin Blanc.