Matching Wines with Seafood

While it’s tempting to crack into a cold beer after a long day’s fishing, seafood is best accompanied with wine. Peter Langlands discusses the best wine and seafood pairings readily available in NZ.

We are extremely lucky in NZ to have a big diversity of both seafoods – we have the world’s fourth largest EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone) – and stunning wines. In recent years, the varieties of wine being produced in NZ have rocketed. As such, I thought it would be timely to do a review of the different varieties of wines we have here and discuss how to pair them with fish. Let’s face it, it’s the end game that fishing is all about and what could be more satisfying than drinking some locally produced wine matched with locally caught fish?

White wines

It is important to pair white fleshed fish with delicate flavours (snapper, gurnard, blue cod) with wines that don’t overpower the fish. For this reason, a sauvignon blanc served slightly chilled at six degrees is a great choice. Overall, savs are the main variety in NZ.

Moving on, rieslings work well with many white fish and are especially nice when chilled as well. They make an ideal summer wine. Unlike savvies, rieslings will cellar well and their flavours will develop over time. They certainly have more complex flavours than savvies. My favourite rieslings are produced in the Waipara Region of North Canterbury.

A riesling or pinot gris goes well with gurnard.

Chardonnays, especially oaked chardonnays, are also a top white wine match with seafood and will go with more robustly flavoured white fish.

Next in the level of flavour complexity is pinot gris which has become a very popular white wine variety in NZ over the last twenty years. Pinot gris is what is described as an aromatic wine, which are suited to red fleshed or stronger flavoured fish, such as kahawai, mackerel and tunas. Many of the good pinot gris will have a light rose colour.

Yet for a more punchy and sweeter flavoured aromatic wine, gewürztraminer is hard to beat. It pairs well with curry and Asian dishes with seafood. It certainly goes well with stronger flavoured dishes and its punchy flavours also match well with smoked fish. Overall, gewürztraminer is a very sweet wine and many of the better producers make it with deep golden colours. It is also a wine variety that will cellar well and like a good riesling, will develop flavours over time. Gewürztraminer is best served chilled, as chilling will allow the aroma and flavours to come out.

In recent years, the albarino wine variety has hit the NZ market. It’s an elegant, dry, Spanish-style white wine that I would describe as somewhere between a riesling and a savvy. It is a crisp white wine that again pairs well with more delicate white fish, crab and shellfish such as scallops. Albarino is best when the grapes experience very dry conditions in the late summer and, for this reason, the Waipara Region in North Canterbury produces some stunning wines in this variety.

Another white wine variety is viognier. The spritzy and slightly bitter sharp flavours of viognier make it ideal for accentuating the flavours of delicately flavoured white fish and shellfish, and it is perfect for serving chilled after a hot day on the water. Viognier are slightly aromatic but not as strong as gewürztraminer. In many ways, viognier is like a toned-down sparkling wine and I love its spitziness and sharp dry flavours.

Finally, sparkling wines are always good for celebratory occasions and go well with oysters but lack the complex flavours that I like in wines.

Red wines

Overall, white wines are the best matches with seafood, but red wines can also produce some stunning marriages when matched correctly.

Pinot noir is one of the lighter red wine styles and goes very well with more oily and stronger flavoured fish. It is a wine best served at room temp, and I particularly like it in the cooler months. A good pinot noir will have strong earthy tones and I like matching it with jack mackerel, kahawai and especially kingfish. Red flensed tunas such as fresh skip jack and southern bluefin are also good matches, as is smoked salmon in my opinion. A good quality pinot noir served with southern bluefin tuna sashimi is one of my favourite parings.

A pinot noir can be paired with robustly flavoured fish such as blue mackerel.

Another red wine I happily pair with a range of robustly flavoured fishes is tempranillo. It’s a black grape variety widely grown to make full-bodied red wines in its native Spain. Tempranillo is to red wines what viognier is to white – it has a dynamic and spritzy flavour. This makes it a good red wine match for the warmer months of the year and I like to serve it slightly chilled (in contrast to pinot noir). Tempranillo goes well with many Mediterranean seafood dishes.

The other red wine varieties (such as merlot and shiraz) are too robust in my opinion to be used with seafood, unless matched with hot smoked meaty fish such as tuna and kingfish. Octopus is another notable exception as it’s very tasty when tenderised and stewed down in a traditional red wine (this is a traditional Spanish dish).

So, make your journey into seafood more exciting and give some of the lesser known varieties of wine a go. We are certainly lucky to have a huge range of world class wines available in NZ, especially in the realm of white wines. Our world class seafood really deserves to be saluted with a good wine.