Are you sure you want to remove this item from your Recipe Box? Don't have an account? Please log in to your account Never created a password? I've read and accepted the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and confirm I am at least 21 years old. Already have an account? No, thanksI'm already a PureWow fan. Follow PureWow on Pinterest No, thanks I hate pretty things. Whoa: This Is the Absolute Best Wine to Pair with Pizza It’s not a pizza party without a little vino. And, sure, while lots of options stand up nicely to doughy pizza, there’s only one wine that was basically made for drinking with a cheesy, delicious pie. Meet: Lambrusco, a sparkling Italian red. (Call your girlfriend: Red wine can be sparkling, too.) Now we know what you’re thinking: Lambrusco? Isn’t it that like an overly sweet, cheap frat party favorite? But that goes for any low-budget varietal. A quality Lambrusco is light and fresh with fruity tastes (like cherry, wild strawberry and plum) balanced with a slightly dry acidity.

Put it all together—fruit-forward flavor, dryness and bubbles—and you have the ultimate wine to pair with pizza. The light bubbles contrast the doughy crust; the high acidity complements the tomato sauce; and the medium tannins balance the cheesiness. So if you’re picking up pizza tonight, grab some Lambrusco (you can get an exceptional bottle for about $16). best wine making sugarPizza night just got fancy.best non alcoholic wine canadaSome winter nights when my heart is tight, I take the F train from work to stand on the sidewalk in front of the plate-glass window at Lucali, the famed, candlelit pizzeria on Henry Street in Brooklyn, and watch Mark Iacono make pizza. best sweet california wine

His movements are slow, deliberative. They resemble a jungle cat, grooming. The dough moves back and forth in his hands, slowly growing in circumference. Iacono barely looks at it. He looks at the people in the dining room, though his gaze is middle-distance unfocused. His pizza-making is a meditation. Pizza-making should be a meditation. I go home and make pizza.best bottle of wine for 100On other suffering evenings, I walk down the echoing corridors and ramps of Grand Central Terminal and make my way to a stool in the Oyster Bar for a pan roast. wine in korean wordI like the cherrystone version better than the oyster one and, especially, the rich interplay of the clam juice and the cream, the way it soaks into the toast points floating in the center of the bowl. pictures of wine farms

I do not make pan roasts at home. Pan roasts should be made only in the steam kettles of the Grand Central Oyster Bar. But I do make clam chowder, and I float toast points on top of it, and that is what John Cheever called a triumph over chaos, every time.Lately I’ve been doing both, at once: clam-chowder pizza, a balm against the pain of the world. It was probably Frank Pepe who invented the clam pizza, in New Haven, scattering freshly shucked littlenecks onto a round of dough, then pecorino cheese, garlic, oregano, black pepper and a torrent of olive oil. That was in the 1940s, according to his family, which still operates Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana on Wooster Street there. Clam pizza moved south in the decades that followed, to New York City. Lombardi’s put one on the menu. Franny’s made one, makes it still. Most recently, Pasquale Jones. Some are built on the Frank Pepe model. Franny’s omits cheese altogether. Motorino’s is dressed with fior di latte mozzarella in addition to the clams.

They are all the best pizza. Clams are on them. Quibble all you like, but a clam pizza is the very best pizza in the world. My recipe honors no one particular preparation of the pie. It honors all of them, and the teachings of Iacono and the Oyster Bar as well. It uses as sauce the building blocks of a classic clam chowder — alliums slowly fried with bacon, then infused with clam juice and wine, reduced to a glaze and thickened with cream — and tops it with chopped clams, lemon zest and a spray of hot pepper flakes. I spread these elixirs across homemade pizza dough, a recipe I learned from another pizza guru, Anthony Falco, until recently the pizza czar at Roberta’s in Bushwick. But you could use them on store-bought dough and still have a good pizza. Or on slices of sourdough bread, or an old running shoe. Just work slowly as you make it, being present in the moment of creation. Cooking is a practice, a kind of devotion, a form of mindfulness. Wine is great with pizza.

Of course it is! Pizza starts with bread and cheese, which people have been snacking on with wine since the beginning of recorded history; there’s probably an Egyptian drawing somewhere showing wine and cheese at a papyrus club. If you’re having a “white pizza”—olive oil instead of tomato sauce—your wine options are nearly limitless. However, tomato sauce changes everything. It’s highly acidic and, regardless of the recipe, slightly sweet, because tomato is a fruit. It’s also often a little spicy. So traditional pizza is as good a food as any to exercise some basic principles of wine pairing. Let’s look at these three attributes separately. Acidic foods: Many fruits are high in acid; this is why fresh fruits are rarely served with wine. Tomatoes are not the most acidic fruits, with a pH around 4.5 (7 is neutral; lower numbers are higher in acid). Oranges and apples, which can be compared here, are both around 3.5. Most sommeliers recommend higher-acid wine with acidic foods.

This might seem counterintuitive, but you can prove it to yourself. Open a Malbec or a red blend, which are usually low-acid wines, and try some before and after eating an orange slice. Tastes kind of icky after the orange, right? More to the point, it feels kind of icky. You’ll want a higher-acid wine (the French say “fresher”) with your pizza to prevent the ick factor. Slightly sweet foods: Very sweet foods are tricky to pair with wine because they can make wine taste sour. You generally want a wine that’s sweeter than the food, so with chocolate-chip cookies, your options quickly narrow to dessert wines like Madeira or Port. Fortunately, most pizza sauce is barely sweet, hopefully not sweet enough for you to even notice that it is. This means you won’t be limited much in your wine choices; a wine with the tiniest bit of residual sugar will be just fine. You might be surprised by how many wines qualify. Just keep in mind that a wine that you enjoy because it tastes bone-dry might not be the best choice with pizza.

Spicy foods: Foods become more challenging to pair the spicier they get. Pizza with mushrooms and onions, no problem. Pepperoni kicks it up a notch. Jalapenos require you to get creative. This is an easy proposition to test. Try a bite of pizza, taste your wine, then add crushed red peppers to the pizza and try the wine again. Spiciness is the most adjustable pizza flavor and thus your wine pairings depend on your pepper choices. The spicier the pizza, the more you’ll want to look for a lower alcohol wine with a little sweetness. So answer the question already: what wines go best with pizza? There’s a reason pizza restaurants offer Italian wines: they have the kind of freshness that many American wines try to avoid. I rarely have red wines with pizza that aren’t Italian. I’m a big fan of Chianti Classico and other Italian Sangiovese-based wines with meat pizzas, as long as they’re not too spicy. You could also try a Nero d’Avola wine like . Try to avoid tannic wines like Cabernet or low-acid wines like Shiraz.