We are big into food and wine in my house. We love to explore fancy restaurants and go to “wine dinners” and were “foodies” before that was the in thing to be.
I don’t eat meat. I don’t like white wine. So, I drink red wine with fish. Blasphemy! Except, maybe not.
A recent study showed that more than 60 percent of wine consumed by “high-frequency wine drinkers” is consumed without a meal. So it doesn’t matter what you are eating anyway. And as I have been saying for years, “drink what you like. Wine is all palette.”
Alder Yarrow, an influential wine blogger commented at length on the study and on what he calls American wine drinkers’s “insatiable demand for tips, tricks, rules, examples, guidance, glossaries and formulas.”
Lie #1: For any given food/dish there is a “perfect,” “ideal” or “correct” wine pairing.
Lie #2: There are a ton of mistakes and pitfalls out there — lots of wines just “don’t go” with certain foods and vice versa.
Lie #3: Because of #1 and #2, food and wine pairing is an art that is hard to learn, requires deep knowledge and generally is best left to experts.
And these lies, dear reader, are tacitly supported by the wine establishment around the world, quite possibly because there’s a lot more money to be made if everyone acts as if they are true.
For Yarrow, food and wine pairings are a lie because “the single most important variable in the success of wine and food pairing lies completely out of the control of every sommelier and chef in the world. And that variable is me, you and every single person that sits down to a mouthful of food and a swig of wine.”
So, there goes every fancy restaurants pairings idea and the fact that every restaurant needs a sommelier. Or are restaurants just figuring that the average person hasn’t read this article and I just read it because I’m a dork?
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