Best Wine with Salmon

Vintage Roots
Best wine to drink with Salmon

A brilliantly versatile ingredient and delicious cold in salads, salmon can be grilled, poached, roasted. It’s delicious in fish pies and fish cakes and we love a salmon curry! Often paired with wine, salmon is a popular, delicious and versatile fish. Read below to discover Vintage Roots top picks for pairing wine with salmon.

 

Wine Pairing with Grilled Salmon

Grilled Salmon

A richly textured organic Sauvignon Blanc is a great accompaniment to dishes with grilled salmon. For example, this Pan-Fried Salmon with Pine Nut Salsa has quite a lot of flavours; currants, saffron, capers and green olives, so your wine of choice will have to have plenty of oomph to carry those flavours.

 

Best Wine for Smoked Salmon

It is common to find Champagne as a top recommendation as the wine to pair with smoked salmon. Smoked salmon tends to be salty and the bright acidity that is a common feature of Champagne carries that off really well.

It would be understandable if you thought this was all about matching one premium item with another. In fact, there is good thinking behind the match.

Food and Wine Pairing expert, Fiona Beckett has been a long-time enthusiast of drinking a nicely-chilled manzanilla with smoked salmon. I confess to being anxious about them match but it transpired to be heavenly! Thank you Fiona.

 

Wine Pairing with Teriyaki Salmon

When pairing wine with Teriyaki salmon, we recommend a Pinot Noir or a Longchamp Rose. This is to compliment the typical flavours in Teriyaki salmon such as ginger, garlic and soy sauce.

Teriyaki Salmon

Gordon Ramsay’s recipe for Teriyaki Salmon is an all-time favourite for me and it simply never fails. He uses fresh root ginger, garlic, soy sauce, maple syrup and mirin. His recipe for Teriyaki salmon can be found here.

Now, this might come as a surprise but we’ve two options here and neither of them is a still white wine! The fruity Alias Pinot Noir with no added sulphur is a creative and yummy pairing.

If you think a red wine is too much of a stretch, then the medium-bodied Mas de Longchamp Rosé is worth considering.

 

White Wine with Salmon

For many the best wine and salmon pairing with always be white wine.  White wine comes in many weights, styles and flavours. Some top choices may be a Chardonnay or a Chablis.

Leftover salmon can be used to great effect in either a fish cake or in a pasta sauce. Both need very different white wines. A crisp Chardonnay is a great addition for fishcakes. An un-oaked Chablis would be the first choice, or even the Spanish Xarel.lo / Macabeu / Chardonnay blend from Albet i Noya.

Salmon dishes infused with Thai ingredients such as lime, ginger and lemongrass tend to work best with Riesling wines. Beetle Riesling is a top-choice but if you’re feeling a little more experimental then what about the Meinklang Meißer Mulatschak?

 

Salmon and Red Wine

When pairing red wine and salmon, be mindful of the recipe ingredients, and be sure to choose a red wine that has soft and gentle tannins. The wine grape of choice would be Pinot Noir. This wine grape compliments red wine because the wines are typically lighter bodied.

There are plenty of online ideas for cooking salmon in a red wine sauce. That’s always going to be an easy win! Use a friendly Beaujolais or the Feudo di Santa Tresa Frappato for the sauce and then serve the rest of the bottle when you’re good to eat.

You can view Vintage Roots selection of organic pinot noir wines here.

Salmon is a delicious fish and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about wine and salmon pairings where the ingredients are quite varied and influential… But what if you want to enjoy your salmon simple?

 

Best Wine for Salmon Fillets

Salmon Fillet

Salmon fillets can be enjoyed poached or roasted with just a dash of oil, salt and pepper served up with a few potatoes. To compliment these flavours, we suggest a Sauvignon Blanc that makes a great partner for unadorned salmon.

Grinou Reserve Sémillon has a lovely texture and fine, limey citrus fruits. A class act in every way.

Fattoria Pagano’s Falanghina is a precise, bright, mineral-driven white from the south of Italy. Elegantly structured it’s a thrill of a wine and a great choice to pair with salmon.

Vintage Roots also recommends a Adobe Viognier Reserva to pair with salmon fillets, particularly going well with plain-roasted salmon and buttery potatoes.

 

Reasons to eat salmon

Salmon is a good sourced of vitamin B and potassium. Vitamin B plays an important part in keeping us healthy, giving us energy and supporting brain function. Potassium can help maintain lower blood pressure and helps keep the balance of fluids in the body at optimal levels.

We’ve all heard about the importance of Omega-3 and salmon is a rich source. It’s also a lean source of protein which is great news if you’re paying attention to your waistline!

 

Sourcing Organic Salmon

Wild salmon is no longer commercially fished in the UK. Despite being the most purchased seafood in the UK supermarkets, it is all farmed. However, happily there are some UK organic certified producers.

You can read more about organic salmon farming in this helpful blog post published by Glenarm Organic Salmon. Their blog post discusses organic salmon in depth.

If you are looking to continue supporting organic suppliers of food as well as drink, then Vintage Roots organic wine can be accompanied by delicious organic salmon. Buying direct from a supplier such as Glenarm Organic Salmon is perhaps your best bet.

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