Wine Dinner: Leftovers Edition

After completing the worlds's cheapest wine and cheese pairing I figured, why stop there?! I present to you the wine and food pairing using the leftovers from my fridge! After sorting through a mountain of tupperware I came up with three foods, all having very distinct and different taste profiles. For a protein sources there are cheesy eggs scrambled to perfection, accompanied by garlic sauteed zucchini and summer squash as well as some sweet afghan rice. If you've never had this type of rice it is full of strong fall spices such as cinnamon and nutmeg.

Gourmet leftovers

For the wines, we tasted a Bay Bridge Vineyards White Zinfandel and Moscato as well as an Andre Moscato "Champagne" all ringing up around the $6 range.

I started the parings with the Bay Bridge Moscato. This wine worked really well with the sweet rice, the fruity apple sweetness of the Moscato and the spices of the rice combined to give you the sense you were eating an apple pie in meal form. For the eggs, it felt odd to be drinking wine and eating eggs at the same time but the acidity of the wine brought out the sharp flavors of the cheese in the eggs. The last pairing of this wine with the vegetable didn't seem natural for me. The heavy garlic of the vegetables called for a wine that was a little less sweet than a Moscato, it did seem to bring out the sweetness even more.

The second wine I tasted was the Bay Bridge White Zinfandel. Quite surprisingly I enjoyed this wine both with and without food and felt it was the most adept at pairing with these three foods. With the rice, the dryness of the wine teamed up with the spices to make this wine almost taste more like a cider. When I moved on to the eggs, the wine seemed to have more of an effect on the egg flavors that the other way around. The eggs transformed into something more substantial with a savory taste. The zucchini was also elevated by the Zinfandel, I felt it did better with the vegetables than the Moscato because of the dry edge that worked with the garlic.

Our meal is prepped and ready for the first pairings

 I saved the Andre Moscato for last because I knew I would finish the bottle once I took a sip. This wine didn't really lend itself to pairing with the meal at all. It has a stand alone sweet flavor with excessive carbonation made for a celebratory toast more than a dinner. The sweet rice worked decently well with the wine, similarly to the last Moscato. However, the summer fruits of the wine didn't blend as well with the fall spices of the rice. Upon trying the eggs I realized how big of a role mouth-feel played with this wine. The bubbles with both the eggs and vegetables was off-putting. The sickly sweetness didn't meld with the salty garlic flavors and didn't have enough balance to bridge the gap.

If there is one thing I have learned from this experience, it is that scrambled eggs have no place in a wine food pairing. Next time I try this sort of pairing I think I will bite the bullet and actually spend more than $6 on it so that I can pair wines with foods they may have a better chance of working with. I was pleasantly surprised to see how the dry or more savory flavors came out of wines that I thought were simply sweet when paired with different dishes.