Wine Simple: Perfect Pairings: An Ingenious Guide to Enjoying Food with Wine

Choose the right bottle for any occasion, whether you’re out to eat or staying in, by learning to think like a sommelier--from the world-renowned wine expert and author of Wine Simple

Sommelier Aldo Sohm knows that the right wine can make or break a meal. As the wine director of New York’s three-Michelin-starred restaurant Le Bernardin, he draws on his decades of experience to help diners navigate a carefully curated wine list and select the perfect bottle to accompany their food. The perfect pairing can be transformative: The wine makes the food taste better, the food makes the wine taste better, and the synergy between the two takes your meal to a whole new dimension. If you’re not a professional, however, understanding how to pair food and wine can be daunting. Enter Perfect Pairings.

Whether you’re scanning a restaurant’s giant wine list or picking up a bottle for a dinner party, Perfect Pairings teaches you how to choose the right wine for the moment. Aldo distills his vast database of expert knowledge into a fun and useful guide that you can turn to at any time. Most wine pairing books simply list which wines to pair with which foods, but Wine Simple: Perfect Pairings goes a step further, teaching you how to think like a sommelier and create the pairings yourself. You’ll learn basic information about the wines you’ll be pairing, followed by ways to think about the elements of what you eat; together, these tools form an ingenious wine-pairing method created by Aldo. Plenty of visual guides, cheat-sheets, and hand-holding will guide you along the way.

With the tools Aldo provides, you’ll learn how to find the perfect pairing for everything from Thai red curry (dry Riesling) to a burger with fries and ketchup (cabernet franc). Whether you’re new to wine pairing or want to level up your knowledge, Perfect Pairings will become your go-to guide for deciding what to drink with your meal.

Aldo Sohm is the James Beard Award-winning wine director of Le Bernardin and a partner in the eponymous Aldo Sohm Wine Bar. Sohm was named Best Sommelier in the World by the Worldwide Sommelier Association, Best Sommelier in America by the American Sommelier Association, and Best Sommelier of Austria four times by the Austrian Sommelier Union. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Christine Muhlke is a contributing editor at Bon Appétit, the founder of Bureau X food consultancy, and the creator of the newsletter Xtine. She has authored cookbooks with Eric Ripert, David Kinch, and Eric Werner.