Wine experts share their top drops to have with fast food
Who says you need to spend the big bucks on fine dining to enjoy a good bottle of wine? Sydney’s top sommeliers, including Bibo Wine Bar’s Louella Mathews share their drops of choice to have with fast food. MULTIMEDIA SPECIAL
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IT’s a confession with a hint of controversy and a counterintuitive bouquet.
According to Sydney’s top sommeliers, cheap takeaway is actually better suited to premium wines than fine dining.
Fuelled by the boom in home delivery, the best wines in the world are now being dusted off and quaffed with everything from burgers and fries to five-dollar pizzas and even Vegemite and avocado on toast.
“Fast food is just simple flavours … a mix of proteins, fats and salts. And those three things form the building blocks of matching food and wine,” veteran sommelier Chris Morrison, author of the top-selling This Is Not A Wine Guide and former head sommelier at Guillaume, said.
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“And wine won’t necessarily be elevated by food but food can be elevated by wine and I think if you have the choice of one or the other … more people are choosing to have cheaper food with better wines and you are still getting a great experience,” Mr Morrison told The Sunday Telegraph.
“Of course there will be some people who say ‘Oh you can’t drink great wine with fast food’, but I think it’s the way things are going.”
Along with the rise of home delivery services, wine experts put the new “Beaujolais and Burgers” trend down to an increase in higher-quality wines at local bottle shops and a boom in younger — and better-informed — wine drinkers.
Louella Mathews, former Rockpool head sommelier who is now based at Bibo Wine Bar in Double Bay, said the trend has been ruminating among the hospitality crowd ever since the birth of Uber Eats.
She said it’s now getting a bigger kick along thanks to fast-food eateries like Mary’s and Belle’s Hot Chicken, which offer both cheap and premium wine offerings.
“It’s kind of like the big thing in Sydney at the moment and when you think about it makes so much sense,” Ms Matthews said.
“My partner and I both work in hospitality and we get home about 1am and order Uber Eats most nights and we have a lot of fun with the wines that we open.
“You can play around with fast food a lot more compared to fine dining because the flavours are much less delicate.
“Fine dining flavours can’t really be belted around by big punchy wines. But with cheap fast food, you can basically do whatever you like.”
The secret to pairing junk with gems, said expert sommelier James Horsfall, is to factor in “sneaky sugars” which make up a big part of a fast food menu.
“It’s sugar that you might not taste upfront but it is there and that can really play a large part on the overall texture and taste of the food … so making sure the wine will be in balance with that sugar is very important,” he said.
Apart from that, he said, fast food and fine wines are extremely well suited.
“Fast food is very wine friendly because it has high fat and high salt both of which help to enhance the fruit characters of wine.”
For Aria restaurant head sommelier Georgina Larrson, a simple woodfired Napolitano pizza is enhanced with a drop of Atanasius, which retails for about $30 a bottle.
“It’s the kind of mediteranean simplicity that inspired me to get into wine in the first place,” she said.
“It’s a remarkably structured and earthy Zweigelt/ Blaufrankish Blend.”
According to Sydney’s top sommeliers, it’s just the beginning of a new-world wine order.
“It’s the golden era now for wine drinkers because we have never had it so good in terms of what we can get our hands on and what we can enjoy it with,” Mr Morrison said/
He said expanding dining options has also forced winemakers to diversify their products.
Wine, he said, is not independent of food anymore.
“Great winemakers are taking their queues from how people like to eat and drink and I think if you ask anyone what their favourite glass of wine was they won’t say; “Oh it was this $16 bottle of something from Dan Murphy’s.
“They will say the place and time and moment when they had it.
“Wine is an experience and that can occur anywhere. Whether that’s on the couch or in a five-star restaurant.”
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