@savoirpair One you’ve never heard of to pair with bbq beef
♬ Happy - Yojo Summer
One of the things I’ve learned about pairing wine with food is to be aware of the sugar/sweetness of the food. If there’s significant sweetness, you want a wine that has considerable fruit character to match. If you choose a wine that’s too dry and acidic, the sweet food will make it taste even more so.
Tina’s exquisite BBQ Beef boasts incredible flavor complexity, including sweetness from the brown sugar of the sauce. So my wine pairing has to be unabashed with its fruit flavors. In addition, the beef chuck has some fat content, so this is a food that will match well with a more tannic wine.
There are lots of good choices to pair with BBQ beef – my only caveat is no shrinking violets. Can’t have light-bodied, delicate red wine with this. It will all but disappear with the big flavors of the beef. Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Syrah, and Rhone-style blends are a great choice here.
I decided to go off the board a bit with a wine I just discovered that’s a terrific value. The wine is from my ancestral home of North Macedonia! The grape varietal is called Vranec, and this label is from a winery called Tikves (pronounced TIK vesh). It brings some serious blackberries, blueberries, and dark cherries, along with a full-body and some noticeable tannins. I also picked up some baking spices like Cinnamon, which are perfect with BBQ sauce. It’s the 2018 vintage, but the tannin is still pretty pronounced, and in the presence of the BBQ Beef it feels right at home. This is a wine for red meats, stews and other hearty dishes.
And it’s a fantastic value. I picked it up for only $13 recently, and at that price it’s a steal. Give it a try – and let me know what you think!