Oh, Tannin-Baum HOLIDAY PAIRINGS PROVIDE SOLUTIONS FOR CELEBR ATING CONSUMERS. The approaching holiday season is high time for wine selling, especially the stretch between Thanksgiving and the end of the year. Research from Nielsen confirms that Christmas and New Year’s Eve are the biggest holidays for wine sales in the United States. If it’s beginning to look a lot like peak consumption time, it’s also a good time of year for grocers to share holiday wine-pairing tips with their customers. What goes well with turkey on Thanksgiving? Experts seem to agree that turkey is a versatile protein, with white meat that can go with white wines or delicate red wines, and dark meat that works with robust red varieties. As with other meal pairings, the ideal pairing depends on how the turkey is cooked and with what sides and gravies it’s served. Other traditional holiday foods have their own traditional pairings. Beef briskets that are popular on Hanukkah, for example, would be well served by a tannin-rich red like Syrah or Malbec. Likewise, a rich standing rib roast on Christmas would be balanced by a Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon. If a crown roast of pork is the star of the holiday dinner, it would work well with a Chenin Blanc, Riesling or rosé. New Year’s Eve, of course, is all about champagne, which goes with just about anything that night. To share wine-pairing ideas and encourage shoppers to pick up wines when shopping for holiday groceries, stores can hold special tasting events, in addition to other merchandising techniques that are part educational and part promotional.
As the holiday season approaches, grocers can get more basket rings by suggesting holiday wines for celebrations, and foods that go with those varieties, from appetizers to proteins to desserts. As with other sampling efforts, tastings are effective this time of year.
Why Not? UNUSUAL AND FUN PAIRINGS CAN CRE ATE SOME SERIOUS BUZ Z. Charcuterie and wine. Red meat and wine. Cheese and wine. Skittles and wine. While that last, admittedly playful pairing may not be top of mind among shoppers, it may generate some excitement for wine and for candy during high candy consumption times of year like Halloween, Christmas and Easter. Halloween-themed wine pairings won’t scare off customers if done in a fun way. The Wellesley, Mass.-based Roche Bros. grocery chain, for example, has promoted certain match-ups for Halloween candy and wines, like sparkling wine and Sour Patch Kids, and Candy Corn and Chardonnay, to name some examples. Another example of a grocer having fun with wine pairings is Lakeland, Fla.-based Publix Super Markets. For National Doughnut Day (June 7), Publix proposed such duos as sparkling wine and old-fashioned sour-cream cake doughnuts, and Pinot Noir and filled long johns. Houston-based Specs, a 100-store chain that sells wines, spirits and gourmet foods in Texas, dedicated one of its blogs to unusual pairings. The ideas for mashups included scrambled eggs and Muscadet, with the creamy, soft eggs balanced by the dry wine with apple, citrus and mineral notes, and French fries and Champagne, with the salty, crunchy fries meeting their match in bubbly Champagne. Specs also shared tips for elevating more ordinary meals, like teaming mac and cheese with Chardonnay, and tacos with Sauvignon Blanc. In that spirit of thinking outside the box — or charcuterie board, as the case may be — there are other ways to mix up matchups of wine and food. In the spring, some inventive retailers have matched Girl Scout cookies with wines when the cookies arrive for fundraising season. Meanwhile, since people seem to like bacon combined with just about anything, it shouldn’t be a surprise that people might belly up to a bacon-and-wine pairing. PROGRESSIVE GROCER September 2019
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