What Wine Where: Piacere Mio
Pasta and wine, what could be a more classic pairing? We visited Piacere Mio in South Park to try out some authentic Italian food with some decidedly non-traditional wine pairings. From rich Northern Italian cream sauces to an ultra-classic Southern Italian marinara, Italian food has depth and complexity in addition to the heartwarming comfort we all love.
Piacere Mio is a neighborhood trattoria serving up hefty portions of handmade pasta, along with a full list of antipasti, salads, and secondi. For this round of tastings, we wanted to focus on the pasta list to see which of our international wine picks shone with the most Italian of Italian food.
What We Ordered:
- Lasagne al Pesto: Layers of wide pasta sheets filled with thin-sliced potatoes, finished in pesto sauce and bechamel, topped with parmesan and mozzarella cheese.
- Ravioli di Carne Alla Boscaiola: Homemade ravioli stuffed with ground beef with sauteed mushrooms, sausage, and peas, finished with a touch of marinara and demi-glace sauce.
- Spaghetti Carbonara: Spaghetti pasta with sauteed shallots, white wine, egg yolk, pancetta, black pepper, a touch of cream, and parmesan cheese.
For our pasta picks, we wanted to sample a variety of sauces to see what surprising flavors our wines highlighted in a cream, pesto, or tomato-based dish. The Ravioli di Carne, our choice in the tomato sauce category, ended up being a tasty surprise — the flavor of the dish was influenced much more by the demi-glace than the marinara.
Both the Lasagne al Pesto and the Spaghetti Carbonara were grand representations of creamy, cheesy decadence. None of the pasta dishes we tried could be called “light” by any stretch of the imagination, so order the lasagne and carbonara when you are really craving a luxurious meal.
The Wines:
No standard Chiantis here! We wanted to try out a few wines from across the globe with our pasta feast instead of more traditional accompaniments. The line-up we chose for this trial includes a robust white, medium-bodied red, and full-bodied red.
- Vina Progreso Viognier 2019: This medium-bodied white is from Canelones, Uruguay. Viognier wines can be very perfumed, but this one is full of minerality, tangy salinity, and citrus ripeness, with just a hint of white florals. This crisp wine made its best match with the Spaghetti Carbonara, where the rich and flavorful butter, garlic, and bacon flavors of the sauce are balanced by the medium-high acidity in the Viognier. The citrus and mineral notes in this wine cleanse the palate after a creamy bite of pasta and the salinity in this wine will have you coming back for another sip, and another, and another.
- Springfield Estate Whole Berry Cabernet 2014: This Cabernet Sauvignon also isn’t one of your usual suspects — hailing from Robertson, South Africa, it’s nothing like most Cabs we know. This wine is very smokey, with savory flavors of cured meat, and not much fruit on the palate. We guessed the low-medium acidity and soft tannins in the Whole Berry Cabernet would be a knockout with a meat-heavy pasta, but its best accompaniment was the contrasting vegetarian Lasagne al Pesto.
This Lasagna al Pesto’s creamy bechamel sauce, layered with the starch of the potato, needed the savory tang of this wine to liven it up. The pesto’s herbal freshness balances and enlivens the deep smoke and salt flavors of the wine. For this wine to be its best, it needed to be balanced by a lighter, more vegetal flavor, instead of being mirrored by a meat-based dish as we first guessed.
- Vintage Longbottom Henry’s Drive Shiraz 2017: This Shiraz from New Zealand’s famous Marlborough region, has a woodsy, smoke note and juicy flavors of black and red fruits. It’s higher in acid, tannin, and body than the Whole Berry Cabernet and paired best with the Ravioli di Carne Alla Boscaiola. This ravioli has a distinct sweetness from the browned demi-glace and a touch of Marsala in the sauce. The dish has a ton of umami flavor from the beef, sausage, and sauteed mushrooms, which complements the more fruit-forward notes of this red.
With this Shiraz, the Spaghetti Carbonara receives an honorable mention. The cream sauce brings out the sweetness of the Shiraz and draws out a fuller, longer finish in the wine.
The Results:
Pasta is one of the most versatile foods on the planet. With near never-ending possibilities of sauce and filling combinations, there are as many pasta flavor profiles as wines that exist to pair with them. Conventional wisdom suggests that you match sauce color to wine color, creamy sauces with white wines, red sauces with red wines. Often, like the Vina Progreso Viognier and Spaghetti Carbonara, this holds true, but we were excited to find an exception to the rule with the Whole Berry Cabernet and the Lasagne al Pesto (which, though pesto-based, is a very creamy dish.)
We discovered that the challenge for these match-ups was in determining if the pasta was calling out for a complement or a contrast. Keeping the sauces and fillings in mind while creating our pairings helped us understand if the dish would benefit from the opposing textures and flavors of an acidic or tannic wine or if what we actually wanted was to let the complexity of the sauce shine while a matching wine played a supporting role.
Try your own pasta pairing experiment at home! Swing by Vino Solera and pick up a spectrum of wines (white and red, light to heavy) to try out with Piacere Mio takeout or your favorite family recipes. Keep an open mind and you may find a surprising new combination to enjoy!
