Anyone who regularly drinks red wine knows that it is primarily intended to pair with foods based around meats and other relatively assertive victuals.
The color and the flavor in red wine both come from the skins of the grapes that produced it, and many people believe that the darker the color, the more intense the flavor. Though this might be true, it doesn’t always follow that the resulting wine is better.
The only conclusions I can draw about very dark-colored red wines are that they possibly were intended to impress people and that the flavors might actually have been harmed by the effort to produce more intense pigmentation.
I do not drink wine for its color. I drink wine for its flavor. And in my estimation, the best red wines to go with food are those that are harmonious, which in most cases means that they are closer to red than black. (We call it red wine for a reason.)
This is not always evident, in particular when some of the most expensive wines being produced in the United States over the last 20 years or so have been extremely dark. The two traits—very dark color and high price—seem to go together.
In 50 years of professionally evaluating wine, I have found that some of the most enjoyable wines actually were lighter in color—and cost a lot less than the supposedly exalted red wines that achieved high scores from other reviewers.
In an effort to get very dark wines with more intense flavors, some wineries end up making reds with a lot more astringency, a bitterness that can be off-putting. Some of the highest-scoring wines were not intended to be consumed young but to be aged for years.
Since few people like drinking young astringent wines, and since few people like to age their wines for years, I suggest that the best red wines to work with food are those that are lighter.
However, since red wine is mostly in bottles with dark tints, it’s not always possible to determine the color of the wine. It might help to hold the bottle up to a bright light. The color should show through the glass.
Another clue to help you get a red wine that’s moderate in color is to seek wines with modest alcohol levels. Wines with 13 percent to 13.5 percent alcohol frequently are lighter in color than wines closer to 15 percent alcohol.
Since alcohol can mask flavor, lower-alcohol reds tend to be more flavorful than wines with higher alcohols. And they usually work better with food.
In the last few decades, most California red wines have risen in alcohol to well over 14 percent. This is due to California’s abundance of sunlight, which generates higher grape sugars and leads to higher alcohols.
Red wines from Europe, by contrast, tend to have slightly lower alcohols because the grapes are grown in a continental climate in which sunlight doesn’t play as great a role.
