Yes! It is possible to serve wine with barbecued ribs.
For me, when it comes to barbecue, I always think of pairing such a meal with beer. But I’m not a beer lover. It fills me up and gives me gas. And I don’t like the taste of it. Crap Craft beer has devolved from quality stouts, ales, porters, and lagers into a gazillion varieties of overly bitter India Pale Ales (IPAs). Then there are the “stunt beers” with ingredients that are just plain weird and should not be in a beverage. Pumpkin ale? Yuck!
(An aside: Will we ever see a return of Anchor Steam? )
So what is a wine lover to do? Well, now that we have really powerful artificial intelligence tools that can do just about anything, I turned to Claude for a recommendation. Here is what it recommended:
- Zinfandel
- Syrah/Shiraz
- Malbec
- Côtes du Rhône
- Rosé
- Off-dry reisling
The zinfandel looked intriguing, and I just so happened to have one in the seller. It was a 2022 Cline Zinfandel. When dinner was ready, I uncorked the bottle and tried a sample. The 2022 Cline was really nice, with bold fruit and not much in the way of tannins. When you open this wine, expect to share it with a partner and finish the bottle because it will not hold more than a day. (If you use a Vacu Vin wine saver it will keep longer, of course.)
For dinner it was the smoked ribs with a spicy barbecue sauce, southwest-style pinto beans, and corn on the cob. Lots of sweetness and spice in the dinner. How would the wine stand up to that flavor combination? Answer: quite well! The fruitiness of the wine along with the spicy notes complimented the smokiness of the meat and drew out the spices in the beans and the sweetness in the corn.
The nice thing about the zin was that it was not a full-bodied wine, which would have clashed terribly with the meal. A could imagine a good malbec having the characteristics when pairing with a barbecue meal. In fact, all of the reds listed above would have worked with my dinner.
I am not as confident in the riesling and rosé recommendation, though. I have paired these before with barbecue and, while the wine I chose held its own against the flavors of the dish, it was not quite as good as the pairing with zinfandel.
So for an all-around good red that works with a broad range of dishes, Cline Zinfandel it is.
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