The Perfect Wine Pairing For Classic Clam Dishes

Let's set the scene. It's early in your relationship and you're preparing a romantic meal at home with the hopes of impressing your date with your cooking skills. After hours of deliberation, you've finally settled on steamed clams with shallot butter, a light but sophisticated seafood dish perfect for date night. There's only one thing left to do — choose a wine to pair with your meal. Finding the ideal wine to pair with something as specific as clams can be daunting, so we turned to an expert for advice. Vajra Stratigos, the director of operations at Jax Fish House & Oyster Bar, knows that creating the perfect pairing involves more than simply choosing a generic white wine to go with any seafood dish.

"It's important to note that clams are prepared and seasoned in a multitude of ways," Stratigos says. "If the pairing assumes a traditional, broth-based preparation, one of my favorite mainstay clam pairings has got to be cava. Engaging, lively, and dry, these wines are aesthetically aligned and their profile in general is a perfect foil for the often briny, salty oceanic profile of a freshly steamed mollusk." If you're unfamiliar with this sparkling wine, cava is essentially the Spanish answer to French Champagne.

Much like how Champagne has strict rules about where it comes from and how it is produced, cava comes from a specific region of Spain and has its own guidelines. The cava classification for Spanish sparkling wine wasn't introduced until the 1970s as a replacement for the previously used term champaña; the move was made in order to avoid confusion (or to avoid ruffling feathers) with France's Champagne. In order to carry the cava distinction the grapes need to be grown in either Penedès (a region in the northeast corner of the country responsible for 95% of cava production) or one of six other regions spread throughout the country in a non-contiguous manner.

Another key component of cava sparkling wines is that they go through a second fermentation within the bottle. This is accomplished by adding some tirage liqueur (a combination of wine, sugar, and yeast) directly to the bottle of wine, meaning the bubbles are created within the bottle you take home.

To pair this type of wine with clams, Vajra Stratigos suggests picking up a 2021 Raventós i Blanc de Nit Rosé. This sparkling rosé has floral notes in the nose, with a berry-forward flavor upon tasting. These vibrant notes and the wine's effervescence complement the seafood-forward flavors found in the aforementioned steamed clams or in a recipe such as our steamed mussels and clams in chorizo broth.