How To Pair Wine With Your Breakfast-For-Dinner Like A Pro

If we're thinking about the best cocktails to whip up for brunch, classics like a sparkling mimosa or savory bloody mary probably come to mind. But what about when you're making French toast for dinner and want to enjoy a glass of wine? While there's plenty of advice out there about pairing wine with steak or pasta, there's less intel for those who know that dining on eggs works at night, too. To fill this void, we turned to a food and wine expert for a little help.

Enter Alejandro Delgado, director of food and beverage at The National Hotel Miami Beach. Delgado talked to Mashed about the best wines to pair with so-called breakfast foods. He offered his top wine picks to go with French toast, eggs, cinnamon rolls, biscuits with gravy, and avocado toast — and he also explained why the pairings work. So here's the crash course on how to pair wine with your favorite breakfast-for-dinner dishes.

French toast is a hearty and filling meal with a delicious combination of bread, eggs, and toppings. Given all it has to offer, it's rather perplexing that French toast has been largely relegated to breakfast menus.

When enjoying French toast at dinner, Alejandro Delgado recommends pairing the dish with syrah. Coming from a grape of the same name, syrah is a full-bodied red wine with dark fruit flavors and a savory, spicy character. Delgado likes these flavors with French toast. "Syrah wine complements the crispy and sweet elements of the dish with its unique smokey and peppery notes, adding those spicy flavors after every single bite," he says. "It's like adding a cinnamon-apple sauce to the dish through the wine."

If you're planning to drink syrah with French toast, you might enhance the pairing by adding blueberries as a topping to the meal. The fruity flavors of the wine often emerge as dark berries, making syrah and blueberries a great match as part of your French toast dinner.

Eggs are versatile and delicious. They also happen to be incredibly nutritious and full of high-quality protein, vitamins, and minerals. They're heart-healthy, good for your eyes, and even aid in brain development. We should welcome eggs to the dinner table.

And for a little wine to complete the meal, Alejandro Delgado recommends pairing eggs with verdejo, a light-bodied, bright, and citrusy white wine. Verdejo is Spain's number one white wine and is almost exclusive to that country. It's often compared to sauvignon blanc — both wines are known for citrusy notes and grassy aromas. These characteristics pair well with eggs. As Delgado explains, "The grassy, herbal flavors, especially lemon and fennel, are very pronounced and will cut right through the fat from the eggs, getting the palate washed and ready for every bite." To get extra mileage with your verdejo wine pairing, consider adding a squeeze of lime juice to your cooked eggs. Given verdejo's citrusy profile, meals with lime make a zingy pair with this white wine.

Freshly baked rolls with warm spices — that beats a plain old dinner roll any night of the week. When you want to pair cinnamon rolls with wine, Alejandro Delgado recommends a good tempranillo.

From the grape of the same name, tempranillo is a red wine that thrives in Spain. With similarities to sangiovese and merlot, tempranillo displays flavors of berries, cherries, and sometimes plums. It's often aged in barrels, which will add vanilla and toasty flavors. Savory characteristics, such as leather and earth, may emerge as the wine ages. Delgado likes a tempranillo with a good balance between earthy and fruity. He says this balance and smooth finish "nicely complement the sweetness and spongy texture of the roll and allows me to keep eating without the cinnamon being too overpowering." The cherry notes often found in tempranillo pair especially well with cinnamon. But don't feel limited to a cinnamon roll — tempranillo would pair just as well with a hearty breakfast burrito as it would with a warm cinnamon roll.

Buttery, fluffy biscuits smothered with creamy, peppery gravy — biscuits and gravy already make such a great pair that finding the right wine to go with this breakfast-for-dinner dish might be a challenge. But Alejandro Delgado has a solution: Cava Reserva, a sparkling wine from Spain. Like Champagne, Cava undergoes a second fermentation in the bottle. While Cava requires nine months of aging on the lees, Cava Reserva requires 18 months of aging on the lees — a longer time than non-vintage Champagnes.

Cava is bright with flavors of citrus and orchid fruits. From aging on the yeast sediment, you might also pick up some savory, bread-like flavors. It pairs well with salty foods, making this bubbly a great way to celebrate biscuits and gravy. Delgado tells us, "The aromas from the Meyer lemon and lime, along with the bubbles, would complement the savory notes of the dish and add a smooth texture." And Cava Reserva tends to be more budget-friendly than Champagne, so you can enjoy more bubbly with your biscuits and gravy.

As director of food and beverage at The National Hotel Miami Beach, Alejandro Delgado knows his avocado toast. Mareva1939, an award-winning restaurant in the hotel, serves avocado toast with tomato, radishes, fine herbs, a fried egg, and chili pepper. Delgado shares, "My favorite wine to enjoy with our very popular avocado toast would be albariño."

Albariño is a bright and crisp, light-bodied white wine with aromas like granite and basil and a variety of flavors, such as grapefruit, nectarine, and orange zest. As Delgado describes it, this all works together to pair well with avocado toast. "The orange zest on the nose and that strange combination of grapefruit and basil aromas in the wine add an incredible amount of freshness to the dish and also cuts the fat from the avocado in a very delicate way, without overpowering the flavors of the dish." Albariño pairs especially well with aromatic herbs, so if you're making homemade avocado toast, top it with cilantro, basil, or chives to enjoy a perfect wine and breakfast-for-dinner combination.