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Pairings

Good Taste is Best Shared

Our meats are perfect for enjoying on their own, or paired beautifully with other cheeses, fruits, and wines. Explore our delicious pairings.

salami with white wines and red wine

Wines

Pairings wines with salumi doesn’t have to follow any fancy rules; on the opposite, the personal taste should always be your guide and combining new wines with our salumi can become a fun way to discover new products. Therefore, the “Monti Verdi wine selection” that follows is a personal list that is based mainly on our Italian favorites which we grew up with and a nice addition of VT local wines that we discovered during our American chapter.

Before diving into the wines, let’s add a few more things that the “experts” recommend when pairing a wine with cured meats.

  1. A salume should accompany the wine without overpowering it, and vice versa. In practice, a cured meat that is lightly spiced (such as prosciutto) requires a wine that is light, with good minerality, and not too complex. On the other side, more spiced salumi (like our Salame Piccante) pair well with more tannic, robust, alcoholic wines.
  2. Salumi that are fattier (like salami) require more acidic wines to “clean up” our mouth from the fat. In general, Northern Italian wines (like Barbera or Nebbiolo) tend to be more acidic than their southern cousins.
  3. The fat in our mouth is perceived as a hint of sweetness and it can be highlighted with gentler, aromatic, young wines, with low tannins. Really fat salumi like guanciale or pancetta go well with wines like Chianti or Montepulciano D’abruzzo.
  4. White wines should be served with lightly spiced salumi, like prosciutto, lonzino or our Salame Delicato, to accompany the sweetness and aroma of these wines.

RED

  • Barbera D’asti - Piemonte, IT.
  • Nebbiolo – Piemonte, IT.
  • Amarone della Valpolicella - Veneto, IT.
  • Bonarda – Lombardia, IT
  • Montepulciano d’Abruzzo – Abruzzo, IT
  • Aglianico – Basilicata, IT
  • Ciro’ - Calabria, IT
  • Cannonau - Sardegna, IT
  • Marquette – Shelbourne Vineyard, VT
  • Farnsworth – Lincoln Peak Vineyard, VT
  • Dameajeanne – La Garagista, VT

WHITE

  • Tigullio, Liguria, IT
  • Arneis – Piemonte, IT
  • Etna Bianco – Sicily, IT
  • Vermentino - Sardegna, IT
  • Gewürztraminer – Trentino Alto Adige, IT
  • Iapetus Substrata – Shelbourne Vineyard, VT
  • Chardonnay – Honora Winery, VT
Salami with variety of cheeses

Cheeses

There is nothing more Italian than a platter of salumi and cheeses served as antipasto (appetizer). Here in Vermont we feel lucky to have such a great variety of cheeses to pick from our artisanal cheesemakers! When pairing cheeses to salumi (cured meats in Italian) the combinations are endless; the best option is always to try them all! Soft, hard, fresh, creamy, crumbly… texture is for sure one of the element to consider when we do a pairing. For instance, a slice of prosciutto could go well with a hard chunk of 36 months Parmigiano Reggiano as well as a fresh cheese like burrata. Our recommendation is to choose 5 or 6 cheeses of different age: 2 well aged (over 10 months) and firm , 2 medium aged (4 to 8 months) and 1 or two fresh cheeses.
Here’s our cheese and salumi pairing list:

  • SALAME CLASSICO & DELICATO: Toma Piemontese/ Reverie from Parish Hill Creamery
  • SALAME PICCANTE & AROMATICO: Caciocavallo / Crowley cheese extra sharp
  • PROSCIUTTO: Parmigiano Reggiano (plus a good balsamic vinegar) / Willo’wisp from Fairy Tale farm
  • COPPA: Pecorino Sardo / Invierno (well aged) from VT Shepherd or Nuberu from Fairy Tale farm
  • PANCETTA: Gorgonzola, Middlebury Blue from Blue ledge farm
  • LONZINO: Mozzarella di Bufala or Fontina / Crottina from Blue ledge farm
Salami with ciders and beers

Ciders & Beers

Beers/ciders and salumi are sort of a blank canvas where new things can happen. If salumi and wines have been together for centuries now, beers and ciders have been a relatively new discovery for the cured meat lovers in Italy and in the US. Craft breweries popped up like mushrooms in the past 20 years and today we really have a huge selection of excellent beers and ciders that we can pick from. Here’s our list of favorites for a good night with friends and family!

  • Frost - Lush Double IPA
  • Burlington Beer – Elaborate Metaphore
  • Hermitthrush - Caulk the Barrel and Float it Across - Amber
  • Otter Creek Brewery – Daily dose IPA
  • Simple Roots – Elderflower saison
  • Queen City Brewery – Munich Dunkel
  • Lawson’s Finest Liquids – Sip of sunshine
  • Windfall Orchard Cider – Farmhouse cider
  • Shacksbury Cider – Arlo cider
Salami with sandwich ingredients

Sandwiches

Snacks are not an afterthought. We offer ideas for alternatives to the store bought 3 lbs of cold cuts cramped inside a sad piece of white bread. Here are our suggestions:

  • SALAME CLASSICO with lettuce and smoked gouda
  • SALAME PICCANTE, dried tomatoes under oil, grilled eggplants, provolone
  • SALAME AROMATICO, grilled red peppers and mushroom pate
  • PANCETTA, frittata, onion jam and romaine lettuce.
  • COPPA with blue cheese and artichokes
  • Focaccia with PROSCIUTTO, arugola and buffalo mozzarella
  • LONZINO with sheep cheese and radicchio

Food & Farm Facts

People may think pigs are the smartest farm animal, but our chickens can outsmart some of our pigs!

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