food pairing for amarone

I asked this a couple years ago, and the answer was "none"! Cheese would be good. I think it's such an interesting wine that the point is the wine, not the pairing with food. Just MHO

One often hears of Parmigiano Reggiano. In particular if you can get the "vacche rosse" variety.

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Beef in Amarone

Cheese, not your girlyman velvetta or brie but parmesan and "blue" cheese the heavier the better,

Robust chocolate shows wll too.

There is an area in the DOC are on the hill above Negrar (cere Negrar)where Quintarelli, Dal Forno, Ca Del Monte(a former client), Masi, Allegrini and other own vineyards or buy grapes, for some reason the fermentation process used to make amarone, recioto and ripasso wines, gives the wine a cinnamon like nose and distinctive fruity flavor, different then wines sourced from other areas. For these a dessert with cinnamon marries well.

Thomas,

One of my favorites is osso bucco. I have had an amarone with the traditional veal osso bucco which is a wonderful pairing, the flavor of the veal shanks (and marrow) work well with the richness of the wine. I have also had an amarone with a lamb shank based version but it didn't quite work as well. Now that I think of it, I just might have to do an osso bucco for our Christmas dinner hmmmm...

Thanks, Tom AZ (after a few month absence)

Hi Thomas, I am from Valpantena, a valley very close to Valpolicella. I think that the best food for Amarone belongs to the typical Verona's cuisine, so we can exclude chocolate and other sweet amenities.

I think that the natural dish is "bollito misto con salsa pearà" that is made with beef baked (not roasted) with a salse made of bread.

You can also try the typical salame, called "soppressa" with "polenta" (mais soup)

if you want to try the cheese, it must belong to the Verona's country, so I suggest "Monte Veronese" aged 18 months.

Finally, you can try Amarone "stand alone" :)

My 2 cents

Cheese/meat ravioli with a very thick tomato sauce would be one suggestion.

You are taking a dogmatic view of pairings. Local pairings sometimes work well. Not always. I would say even not often.

Chocolate (and not articularly sweet either) goes damn well.

Delicious, not sure about the pairing. Salsa peara' might overwhelm the wine.

Soppressa is way too fat and salty for a wine like amarone, you would need a less tannic more acidic wine for that, like a good chenin from the Loire, or a red from nearby lake Garda.

It must, it must. There you go again. As if anyone outside your area could fine Monte Veronese, you cannot even find it in Vicenza.

Now you are talking !

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link

Hi Mike, it's a pleasure to meet you (I often read your posts in it.hobby.vino and I often found them interesting)

Yes, I know. But I can't stand pairings that don't belongs to the country where the wine are made.

I am not a professional about wine, only a fan.

Just yesterday noon ( and later ..) I spent 3-4 hours drinking Valpolicella Superiore, Amarone 2000 and, from oak directly, Amarone and Recioto 2001, in a my wine-maker's friend cellar in Valpolicella (Valgatara).

We taste valpo & his friends with soppressa, pancetta and torta sbrisolona with Recioto.

"The vibrations" was good even if not "politically correct" :)

It works good, I know.

You are right, maybe let me say "academic" :)

It would be a "provocation", but how to explain to pair for istance a "pecorino di Pienza" to an American?

The final message, IMHO, is: the best way to pair Amarone is visit Verona and his "osterie".

Hi again Mike, it was a pleasure!

Thanks, I've also seen you around, good to read you again

Well, why not? Even our veneto traditions (I stress "our", as you know I was born and raised in Venice) are almost by definition a wholesale adoption (and yes, adaptation and good usage) of "foreign" things, polenta being the most obvious, but also many other things, our spices, our baccalá or stoccafisso (stokvis? bacalhao?) are not exactly home grown, and even wine, in our history, was most often from somewhere else, Puglia or Greece ("foresto" ring a bell?).

Likewise. My work is in specialized computing for telecom.

Wish I was there.

Well presumably you would pair a white with some power to it, and IMHO you have a much better choice of excellent white wines way far from Tuscany, where the whites are for the most part flat and uninteresting. And since Friuli is about as foreign to a Tuscan as the Pacific coast of the US, maybe more, then why not? How about a NZ sauvignon with pecorino di Pienza, bet you that would work really well. Er, as a matter of fact, why not a pecorino from NZ, since there is no lack of ovines down there...

Definitely !

Cheers

Mike

Mike Tommasi, Six Fours, France email link