What Works, and Why? Wine with Greek-Style Shrimp

Jul 9, 2008 | Blog

It is 9:00 a.m. as I write this, and I happen to be a person who is not big on breakfast.  Yet the very thought of fresh sautéed shrimp with crumbled feta cheese and a little kick of spicy pepper is enough to make my mouth water.

Several trips to Greece have left me deeply enamored of Greek cuisine, which deserves to be far more widely enjoyed in North America.  Greece’s marvelously tart yet deeply flavored feta cheese is among this cuisine’s most distinctive and compelling ingredients, yet it can prove a bit tricky for wine pairings precisely because of its distinctiveness.  How should you know which wine to select to pair with a dish incorporating it?

Turn to “Wine With….”  This feature by Paul Lukacs and Marguerite Thomas, which has been published on Wine Review Online since we launched the site nearly three years ago, is perhaps the wine world’s most useful and interesting source for advice on selecting wines that really sing with a whole range of dishes.

What I most love about what Paul and Marguerite convey in their feature are their insights into the underlying reasons why certain wines work–or don’t work–with particular dishes.  When experimenting with a broad set of wines in a single food context, they often hit upon surprising results, but never stop short with a mere report on the outcome.  Rather, they draw you into the interior of the taste experience in a way that teaches you underlying principles that can prove helpful whenever you need to choose a wine to flatter a particular ingredient, flavor or texture.

So, if your ears perk up at the sound of a dish like Greek-Style Shrimp and want to know what would be great to drink along with it, check out this week’s ‘Wine With…’

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