Wine and Chips
This week’s newsletter is devoted to the iconic duo of wine and chips. Partly inspired by Food52’s cheese and chips pairing — which I misread at first, thinking it was a chips and wine pairing post, and then wondering why it wasn’t — but mostly inspired by a desire to eat chips and drink low-intervention wine. So together with a group of taste-testing friends, we sanitized and distantly and safely compared and contrasted a variety of chips and wines; documenting the results in a matrix, with a selection of our findings (ie. best combos) below. Please note that this was a limited tasting — there are a lot of chip flavours and wines out there you guys! — but if you are interested in a deep dive of chip/wine analysis there’s this. In general, when pairing wine with food, taste is subjective (you do you!), but the idea is to find the right balance between the components of wine (sugar, alcohol, tannin, acid) and the components of food, and their corresponding texture and weight; and for more pairing tips, there’s Wine Folly.
Sparkling Wine and Parsnip Chips. Pétillant Naturel or “Pét-Nat” is the OG way to make sparkling wine, made by a method so old that the French term for it is methode ancestrale, where the wine is bottled while it’s still fermenting. At first we paired a 2019 Roussanne Pét-Nat, from BC’s Rigour & Whimsy, with Dill Pickle Chips, whose strong flavour overpowered the delicate wine. But in a surprising twist, we tried it with Parsnip Chips, and this unexpected pairing resulted in just the right balance between the chip’s milder flavour, and the lightness of the sparkling wine.
Riesling and Salt and Vinegar. While the memorable “Unwind Together” campaign paired Miss Vickie's OG chips with red wine from Woodbridge, we opted for Vickie’s Salt and Vinegar Chips with Ontario Riesling from Therianthropy. The dry, fresh, and Alsatian-y style Riesling helped neutralize the salty/vinegaryness of the chips, making for a tasty/addictive combo. And while it didn’t affect taste, everyone enjoyed the great label art by French illustrator Michel Tormer.
Skin-Contact and Hickory Sticks. Skin-contact or “orange” wine is a white wine that’s made like a red wine, where the wine is fermented with its skins — giving the wine more texture, flavour, and colour — and it‘s been around for 8,000 years! Emilio, a skin contact made from Furlanski Tokej, Ribolla Gialla and Pinot Gris, from Slovenia’s Štekar, paired well with the technically-not-a-chip-but-a-potato-stick, Hickory Sticks. The medium weight of the wine, matched the medium intensity of the smokiness of the stick, without overpowering one over the other.
Lambrusco and Cacio e Pepe Chips. And lastly, we paired Labrusca Rosso with Cacio e Pepe Chips, a revelation in chips. The tang of the Pecorino, and the spice of the black pepper, were a good match for the bright and refreshing Lambrusco. Lambrusco is a sparkling red from Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, with a gentle bubble derived via the ancestral method, known as “rifermentato in bottiglia” (refermentation in bottle). In general, Lambrusco is very versatile and food friendly, with other ‘Brusco faves being the Paltrinieri Solco dell’Emilia and Quarticello Ferrando.