Fred Tasker’s Wine with Chicken Suggestions

Miami Herald wine columnist, Fred Tasker, gives his chicken and wine pairing suggestions.

Let’s talk about wines that go with chicken.

Starting with these tasty, prize-winning chicken burgers. They have lots of Asian flavors – garlic, scallions, lemon grass, soy sauce, sesame oil, limes. I know a great wine to go with that. A 2007 Marques de Riscal white wine from the Rueda area, made with verdejo grapes. It’s really fruity, with flavors of pineapples and peaches. And it’s only $7.

But did you notice? I didn’t match the wine with the chicken. I matched it with all the flavorful things that went on the chicken.

Chicken just tastes like chicken. Hardly any flavor at all. Hard to match a wine with that. On the bright side, it’s hard to find a wine that will clash with it, either.

Chicken is a tabula rasa, a blank canvas, an empty slate on which brilliant artists like Linda and Brigitte Nguyen paint their flavors. And the rest of us can do the same.

Poach chicken in white wine and you’ll want the most delicate white wine with it – a muscadet, maybe.

Grill chicken with barbecue sauce and you want a hearty, spicy red wine like zinfandel. Again, you’re matching the wine to the sauce, not the chicken.

Buy a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken and you want cheap bubbly with it, so those scrubbing bubbles can cut through all that grease. Same with chicken McNuggets.

Make a rich chicken pot pie with butter and cream and sherry and you – or I, at least – want a rich and buttery $600 bottle of fine French White Burgundy with it. If you have a friend with a good cellar.

Make a French-style roasted chicken with garlic and herbs and a big California chardonnay will be just right.

Build a creamy chicken-salad sandwich for a picnic, and a nice dry, fruity rose will be a wonderful match.

In fact, chicken is so non-specific in flavor that there’s a trick you can use to make it go with any wine in the world. You just sauté a nice, fat chicken breast and make a sauce out of the wine you want to serve with it.