The jury is in on Shiraz with pork!

Many of you are aware of my recent experiment of having an elegant Shiraz with a pork fillet, mash, gravy and vegetables the other evening.  The meal on its own was magnificent and so was the wine.  The combination of the two together was adequate, but not perfect.  The 15 year-old Shiraz was made in a less heavy style than many other Shiraz' and had soften quite a bit with time.  Yet, it was still too powerful and overwhelming for the pork.  I love to co-mingle perfectly matched food and wine, but the Shiraz over-powered the food in this case.  I needed to take several minutes of palate resting between bites of food and sips of wine to really enjoy both on their own.

So in the case of a good pork fillet in the future, it will be back to Pinot Noir for the most part.  However, I was reminded by RAP (a blog viewer and commenter), that another beautifully styled wine to match up with pork is a GSM blend.  GSM is common wine terminology for Grenache, Shiraz, and Mouvredre (often called Mataro also).  This blend works beautifully with pork, and I have even written about this as a possibility previously.  This was a superb suggestion RAP!  The GSM blend is softer and more of an old world style that works well with a pork fillet.  There is a lot going on in this blend and it is quite complex in terms of the primary and secondary flavors coming through.  Yet, it does not overpower pork.

Another mate suggested that if a meal does not match well with the 1998 Tyrrell's Vat 9 Shiraz, well then just throw out the meal!  This may be a bit extreme, but he does have something in the Vat 9 being a meal on its own!

After the meal, I did indulge in a couple of pieces of Lindt Chili Chocolate which does match perfectly with Shiraz.  The chili infusion in the chocolate provides some power to match the power of a good Shiraz.  So it was a very good evening of food eating and wine drinking, but in the future, it will be even better by drinking a Pinot Noir or GSM when serving pork.


Steve Shipley
Twitter: @shipleyaust
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