WINE 101** Massimo Mele’s Riccadonna-inspired Recipes

We’re huge fans of wine here at Sydney Social 101, (it makes us happy) and we’re always looking for new ways to drink it, celebrate it and cook with it! We’ve teamed up with the guys at Riccadonna (one of our absolute faves) to create some amazing recipes that you can create for yourselves as summer approaches.

Here’s a taster of what you can create for yourself at home:

We attended a dinner at Salt, Meats Cheese (which is unreal BTW!) which had been created by celebrity chef Massimo Mele inspired by four of the Riccodonna sparking wines. After the delicious meal we decided that we wanted to share some of the tips with you guys about pairing wine with food in the run up to Sydney’s Summer season.

Italian Sparkling wines are basically food­friendly and complement a wide variety of foods. While there are exceptions, Italian wines tend to be medium bodied, not highly alcoholic and have pleasant but not knock­your­socks­off flavours, we LOVED the Asti for a light refreshing beverage on a hot summer’s day.

It is this balanced combination of characteristics that make Italian wines the perfect accompaniment with food.

Before we begin with the amazing recipes created by Massimo Mele, here are some important tips to bear in mind when pairing wine with food:

• Don’t match strong to delicate. Pairing a big, powerful, high­alcohol or high­tannin wine with a light, delicate dish (and vice versa) is rarely a good idea
• Acidity is your friend. People tend to be wary of wines described as “high acid,” like Muscadet. But there’s no better quality in a wine for matching rich, creamy or cheesy sauces, deep­fried foods or fish dishes; in addition, tart wines go better with tart foods, such as a vinaigrette on a salad
• Don’t serve a sweet wine with an even sweeter dessert – t he sweeter counterpart will make the less sweet counterpart taste sour. In addition, extremely sweet wines with extremely sweet desserts can result in a kind of taste­bud overload—for instance, combining Asti Spumante with something like sticky toffee pudding. It’s also worth noting that ice cream, and any dessert that’s served very cold, will only numb your taste buds, making the idea of a wine pairing somewhat of a moot point

Here are the recipes and the matched wines, if you’d like to find out more about Riccodonna and its amazing sparking wines, you can follow its facebook page here: