Wine Simple: Perfect Pairings: An Ingenious Guide to Enjoying Food with Wine - Hardcover

Sohm, Aldo; Muhlke, Christine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593796950 ISBN 13: 9780593796955

Publisher: Random House Inc, 2025

Synopsis

Sommelier Aldo Sohm knows that the right wine can make or break a meal. As the wine director of New York’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Le Bernardin, he draws on his decades of experience to help diners navigate a carefully curated wine list and select the perfect bottle to accompany their food. The perfect pairing can be transformative: The wine makes the food taste better, the food makes the wine taste better, and the synergy between the two takes your meal to a whole new dimension. If you’re not a professional, however, understanding how to pair food and wine can be daunting. Enter Perfect Pairings.

Whether you’re scanning a restaurant's giant wine list or picking up a bottle for a dinner party, Perfect Pairings teaches you how to choose the right wine for the moment. Aldo distills his vast database of expert knowledge into a fun and useful guide that you can turn to at any time. Most wine pairing books simply list which wines to pair with which foods, but Wine Simple: Perfect Pairings goes a step further, teaching you how to think like a sommelier and create the pairings yourself. You’ll learn basic information about the wines you’ll be pairing, followed by ways to think about the elements of what you eat; together, these tools form an ingenious wine-pairing method created by Aldo. Plenty of visual guides, cheat-sheets, and hand-holding will guide you along the way.

With the tools Aldo provides, you'll learn how to find the perfect pairing for everything from Thai red curry (dry Riesling) to a burger with fries and ketchup (cabernet franc). Whether you’re new to wine pairing or want to level up your knowledge, Perfect Pairings will become your go-to guide for deciding what to drink with your meal.

About this title

About the Author

Aldo Sohm is the James Beard Award-winning wine director of Le Bernardin and a partner in the eponymous Aldo Sohm Wine Bar. Sohm was named Best Sommelier in the World by the Worldwide Sommelier Association, Best Sommelier in America by the American Sommelier Association, and Best Sommelier of Austria four times by the Austrian Sommelier Union. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Christine Muhlke is a culinary consultant and the creator of the xtine newsletter. The co-author of Wine Simple, she has authored cookbooks with Eric Ripert, David Kinch, and Eric Werner.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

Wine is magic. How is it that crushed grapes can become something so delicious and transportive? Part of that magic is in how it brings us together. We rarely drink wine alone, in both senses: While we may enjoy a solo glass at home or while waiting for friends at the bar before a meal begins, we inevitably share wine with others. And when we pair it with food, the combination can create a new kind of magic.

Of course, you can drink whatever you want with your meal, or eat whatever you want with that special bottle you picked up at the wine store. But this book was written and designed to open your mind to the experiences you can have when you put some extra thought into either of those choices. Because when food and wine align or contrast in just the right way on your palate—and everyone’s palate is different—little bells go off in your head. You close your eyes for a few seconds. Suddenly, you’re fully present in a pleasurable new dimension. And when you’re really lucky, the people you’re sharing the meal with are transported there, too. It can change your whole night. Watching people experience this exact moment was one of the inspirations for dedicating myself to learning about wine several decades ago. Today, I think of myself as part sommelier, part travel agent.

Fortunately, you don’t have to train as a sommelier to know all there is to know about wine. That was the idea behind my first book, Wine Simple, an easy-to-use handbook for navigating the very complex world of wine. Taking it a step further, this book is for those who want to learn about wine and how to pair it with whatever they’re eating.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House Inc
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593796950
• ISBN 13: 9780593796955
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272