Food and Wine Matching. Let me save you a million!

This topic reminds me of a story once told to me by a wine sales manager from Atlanta. He said that successful restaurateurs from the American North East were coming into the Atlanta market and setting up beautiful, UNsuccessful restaurants. He told me of his desire to set up his very own consulting service to help these misguided, over confident aspiring marketers of the latest culinary fads. It was a very simple service that he would provide. The first and only question was how much money they were prepared to spend to build their temple of gastronomy. They would answer in the millions of dollars and he would then respond to each and every one with  “I would like to save you 90% of your investment. Yes, all you need to do is hire me as your advisor for 10% of budget and I will save you the rest by advising you not to build the restaurant in the first place.” He wanted to save them millions of dollars!
I feel the same way about food and wine matching and I will tell you why.

First thing we learn in food and wine matching is that there are rules. They seem simple enough. White food requires white wine and if it is small, like  fish, it needs a small white wine. Red, well that is easy too as it goes with red meat.  If it is game you're having, you bring out the big Shiraz, while rabbit would be be best with Beaujolais.  So I took these rules and ran a ten year experiment at my winebar, Delisle, from 1985 to 1995. And I admit that after ten years I was confused.  If there were rules, why did they not work consistently?  And if they were not consistent, what kind of rules were they?

Delisle was a crazy wine place and we did countless wine events and dinners with people such as Marcel Guigal, Jean-Pierre Perrin, Warren Winarski, and way too many more to begin to mention.  Many celebrity chefs such as Didier Leroy, Chris Macdonald and Susar Lee made guest appearances. I only had one aim and that was to set the highest standards when it came to the matching of the cuisine to these fabulous wines with these top notch chefs. I would meet with the chefs and they would take notes as we tasted every single wine. We would scheme and plan and come up with what we thought were the combinations that would blow our customers away.

Trouble is that they didn’t. Do not get me wrong, we had countless enthusiastic comments on the perfect matches but we also often had people commenting that it was not their favourite match. But there are rules; you are supposed to like this combination.  I mean, there are rules? Did I misinterpret something? Where did I fail?  I had no answers.
No, I am not that smart. I was like one of those North Eastern carpetbaggers. I thought I knew. It was only after I sold Delise and entered the wine importing business and had the pleasure of meeting one Tim Hanni that I began to understand. As a Master of Wine, Tim knows a lot more about wine and food matching that I did, so I quizzed him as to why these rules did not seem to work.

Tim laughed at me. How could they work? We are all human with our individualistic tastes.  None of us will react in exactly the same way to anything. Think about it, you may love Rock & Roll or Metal, or Classical or Folk or Ethnic or Roots etc. You might like Monet or Degas or Picasso or Dali or Warhol  etc. You might like your coffee black or double double or anything in between.  Are you a carnivore, a locavour or a vegan?
We are all unique individuals and being unique we have unique tastes on all things sensual.

So let me save you a million dollars and let you in on a little secret.
Food and wine can complement each other magnificently but there are no hard and fast rules that will work for every setting and every person.
So do not stress about it too much.  Eat what you like and drink what you like and you will probably really enjoy your repast.