The steak dinner that you’ve been planning for days should be accompanied by the best wine for pairing. You gotta have something to chase down that filet mignon, right? Well, today is your lucky day because filet mignon wine pairing (or any steaks in general) just got simpler.
The Wine for Steaks
There is a myth about what a ‘Wine for Steak’ should be like – here in America the fallacy is that it must be bold, full-bodied and highly tannic. This is because most West Coast vineyards only produce their Cabernet Sauvignon & Syrah blends to be such a way and suggest pairing them with steaks like filet mignon and other meat cuts. Yet, we were taught differently by our French heritage.
Steak Wine Pairing
Main dishes based on steaks and grilled beef meet require a completely different style of wine: a full-bodied and complex red wine able to both sustain the aroma of the steak and to balance the fattiness and tenderness of the meat. The most important feature of pairing wine with steak is the tannin level that must be from medium to high, with smooth and rounded tannins. High tannins are needed to balance the fattiness of the steak, cleaning the mouth and enhancing, with their delicate bitterness, the smoothness of the meat on the aftertaste. Moreover, aromas of red and black fruit tend to perfectly match with the flavor of a steak or grilled meat in general, enhancing the flavor of the dish.
The required red wine in “steak wine pairing” must be made from high tannins and high phenolic varieties, just like Cabernet Sauvignon, Montepulciano or other Bordeaux varieties; at the same time, the tannins and aromas must be ripe, in order to maintain the balance of the pairing. It means that the wine should come from a warm to hot climate, where the phenolics of the grapes can fully ripe before harvest. “The Wine For Steak” by PairME Wines is the ideal ‘wine for steak’ and wine for grilled meat in general thanks to its high, yet rounded tannins and fully ripe black fruit aromatics. In fact, this wine is produced from a blend of Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon grown in the warm climate of Southern France.
How Our ‘Wine for Steak’ is Sourced
We too could have sourced our wine to be like so (bold, full-bodied and highly tannic), but we aren’t the average, mainstream brand as I’m sure you can tell by our label. We pride ourselves on the belief of creating exceptional pairings for food and wine without the wine ‘snobbiness.’ We source from a region where the grapevines have a symbiotic relationship with dinosaur fossils in the soil the farmers are holding generations of shared experience.
Our ‘Wine for Steak’ comes from the vineyards of the Cave des Vignerons de Saint-Chinian an 800-hectare plot situated between 120 and 300 meters high, and benefiting from a Mediterranean climate, are planted all the best-known grape varieties of the Languedoc. Here due to climate and terroir Cabernets are softer than those found in Californian wines – thus often we receive feedback that the wine is too ‘soft or sweet’. We don’t take this to heart as that feedback is often given by someone who hasn’t been exposed to much wine from the South of France but mainly new age American ones.
The Wine for Steak Profile
Our Cabernet – Syrah from the South of France was made by us along with many experts in the trade. ‘The Wine for Steak’ is velvety, fruity and has a hint of spice which compliments many a steak preparation in beautiful ways that the average steakhouse is not complex enough to recognize. One mustn’t get fooled by the steak being something that needs to be paired with bold and heavy wines but to really bring out the flavors of a complex cut of meat we believe in enriching the palate rather than overbearing it.
PairME’s “The Wine for Steak” is available in store all over New York, you can also order it online, click here.