Wine and food pairings: The first rule to know is there are no rules.

In spite of what you may have been told there are few mysteries to pairing food and wine, and even fewer rules.  There I said it.  What’s more is that this simple, unassailable fact is something EVERY wine professional knows, or should know, but will never admit out loud, in public.  Why?  Because we have fetishized wine to the point that it has morphed into something that loses any connection to what it really is.  Wine has ALWAYS gone with food.  For well over three thousand years wine was drunk in lieu of water in days when water wasn’t always the safe bet to drink.  Wine was drunk with everyday meals and celebrations alike, and it was simple and ubiquitous as rain water.  Eventually people got better at making wines and we starting forming opinions about what made a good wine great and that not only was a proper meal incomplete without a bottle of wine, certain wines actually tasted better with certain foods and vice versa.  And that’s when everything started to go horribly wrong.

Not completely wrong mind you. Not at first, anyway. There is some truth to the common wisdom that a nice crisp white wine will pair much better with something like butter sautéed scallops than a massively tannic red wine. Such common sensibilities are ultimately responsible for the incredible traditions of winemaking and cultivation around the world. If you’ve ever wondered why Tuscan red wines are the way they are you have only to tuck into some authentic regional dishes, in this case let’s say a Filet of beef with a balsamic vinegar sauce, to find your answer. These wines just taste better with what people eat most of the time in these places. Over their centuries of evolution, the regional cuisines of the wine producing areas of the world and the people responsible for their creation have "settled" on the wines that worked best for them.

However, within these basic sensibilities were planted the seeds of a poisonous idea. An idea that has grown to the point that every evening across our country, wine lovers stand rigid with fear in the aisles of their local wine shop or grocery store, trying desperately to choose the "right" wine for whatever they are making for dinner that night.  An idea that has caused many an experienced wine lover to tremble at the thought of taking responsibility for ordering a wine for an entire table of guests, for fear of choosing a wine that will cause the sommelier to arch his or her eyebrows at and ask with a sneer, "are you sure you want to drink THAT with your chicken, Sir?"

The idea that there are "proper" wine pairings is so pervasive now that in addition to the countless books that exist to assist the less experienced figure out exactly what to cook to match their wine, there are now even several wine brands whose sole existence consists of "eliminating the guesswork." On the other end of the price spectrum lay the fine dining restaurants of the world, with sommeliers that work hard to put together 8 course flights of wine pairings for $120 to accompany your tasting menu. These pairings, which at the best restaurants are both artfully done and offer opportunities to try interesting wines, serve to further reinforce a universal belief in three fundamental falsehoods when it comes to pairing food and wine:

1. For any given food/dish there is a "perfect," "ideal" or "correct" wine pairing.
2. There are a ton of mistakes and pitfalls out there (i.e., lots of wines just "don't go" with certain foods and vice versa. 
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.

What’s worse is that these preconceived notions are tacitly supported by certain corners of the wine establishment around the world solely because there's a lot more money to be made if everyone acts as if they were true.

I've had a lot of fancy wine pairings, done by people with fancy initials after their names, and six figure salaries in fine restaurants that prove these folks know their stuff when it comes to wine (and they most certainly do). But I tell you honestly, for every one of those wine and food combinations that have been great, there have been just as many that were simply ordinary. That's right, for all of their perceived knowledge and pedigree the pros are hitting around fifty percent, because ultimately the single most important variable in the success of wine and food pairing lies completely out of their control.  The variable of personal taste.

We each bring our own unique sensory perceptions to the process of tasting. It’s like the old proverb of the group of blind people asked to describe an elephant. Each felt a part of the elephant. One person felt the elephant's trunk and described it. A second person felt the elephant's left back foot and described it. A third person felt the elephant's front right foot and told about it. A fourth person had a hold of the elephant's tail and described it. As each described the elephant, the other's disagreed, because their views were different. If everyone in the world could possibly take a bite of one big apple, each of us quite literally tastes something different. What we "taste,” the story we tell ourselves as our individual senses interpret the signals that they are getting from our palate is ours and ours alone.  To think that there is one magic solution that will appeal to everyone or the idea that someone can actually know what they are doing when they prescribe a specific wine with a specific dish is madness.

And the same is true even amongst the “experts”.  Don’t believe me? Pick up any of the big wine publications out there and read a review of the same wine from the same vintage. I’d wager that if you read half a dozen different reviews you’d come away with 6 different takes on the same wine. Some taste chestnuts, some taste tobacco, some cedar, and some espresso. So if the world's foremost wine experts can't even agree on what an individual wine tastes like in a controlled setting, how on earth could someone suggest they will know what it will taste like with food, over the course of an evening?  I know what some of you are thinking right now.  You’re shaking your head and thinking "sure, they might not know exactly what it will taste like for me, but they know that it will generally go well together, don't they?" And I'm here telling you here and now that they can probably say that, about to the point of being able to suggest that a nice crisp white will go better with butter sautéed scallops than a massively tannic red. The rest, my friends, is a mix of luck and opinion.

So here in a nutshell is what you need to remember when it comes to pairing food and wine:

1. There are no right answers. Even the white wine with chicken or fish is wrong if you don't like white wines. When in doubt, always drink what you like and you'll probably enjoy your food and your wine better than you would if you worried about matching them.
2. Take advice only when you feel like it, and don't expect it to be right even when the person is some sort of expert. You might like someone's pairings, and you might not. But just because someone else thinks a pairing will work doesn’t mean you will.
3. Food and wine is all about you so experiment! Go mad! Try different things and figure out what works for you.

So go forth and break free from your chains my fellow wine lovers. Walk fearlessly into your local wine shop, stare down the sommelier at your favourite restaurant. Be fearless! Remember that with wine, like music there is more joy in simple discovery then in scholarship. The only answer to what to drink with what you eat is, in the end, is everything and anything.