Reader Questions: Pairing Wine and Artichokes

If you have a question for our wine-loving staff here at the Georgia Winery, ask us in the comments on our blog, leave us a note on our Facebook page, or send us an email at info@georgiawines.com! We love hearing from y’all, and we’ll try our best to answer any wine questions you can possibly come up with.

Q
Artichokes are in season right now and I want to serve them as much as possible, but I keep hearing that you can’t pair them with wine! Why?

A
Ahh…”impossible pairings.” To answer your question shortly, no- it’s not impossible to pair wine with artichokes. However, it does require just a little bit of thought and effort to effectively complement wine and ‘chokes. Here’s why:

Artichokes are a really fun vegetable with a surprisingly long growing season stretching from mid-spring all the way into fall. You can prepare them a load of different ways, (usually) all delicious. They’re unusual little veggies, though. Their leaves contain tannin, like in red wine and chocolate, which doesn’t make them impossible to pair with wine- just a little difficult. The real problem, however, comes with the organic acid they contain called cynarin. Cynarin is a tricksy bugger that can sometimes make other foods taste sweeter or more bitter after consuming a food with cyanarin (like artichokes). This can turn a wine into either sickeningly sweet or repugnantly bitter, which makes it hard to come up with a good wine to serve with a dish containing artichokes.

Not all hope is lost, though! Preparation of the ‘chokes is key to matching a wine. Grilling the artichokes tends to chill out the cyanarin a bit, and when you serve them with, say, a creamy, garlicky aioli, that sauce sometimes overpowers the cyanarin and tannins in the dish. You should look for a white wine with little natural bitterness to it. Make sure it’s on the dry side, and more acidic than usual. Our Vignoles or even our Tara Bella would be excellent choices with artichokes.