Most of us enjoy curling up with a good book and a glass or two of wine, or sharing a bottle of an evening with some friends.  However I most enjoy a daily bottle of wine with my main  meal.  Wine is undoubtedly at its best with food. This was brought home to me the other afternoon when with colleagues at a supermarket I do some work with we settled down to matching a selection of 19 of their frozen meals with wines.

As soon as food and wine combine in your mouth some subtle chemical changes take place. These can be simply explained by the wine trade expression of ‘Buy on apples, sell on cheese’. The harsh malic acid in an apple seeks out any acidity or tannin in a wine, while the lactic – or milky – acid in cheese tends to soften and round off a wine.  It is not surprising that wine trade often serves cheese at tastings as it helps make enough quite ordinary wines taste that much better.

A gourmet friend of mine always advises taking a small spoonful of a dessert before sipping a sweet pudding wine.  This prepares the mouth for the wine which immediately looses it powerful sweetness and combines with the dessert into a most harmonious combination.

What is important is that the wines should be served at the correct temperature.  We have a tendency to chill our whites until they are so cold that all the flavours are frozen out, while heating the reds until they are so warm that all their subtlety is driven off.  White wines are best fresh rather than frozen, while a red wine should be served at the temperature of an unheated room … not stood on tops of radiators or in front of open fires!   Mind you, I have stood a bottle of red wine straight form a cool cellar in the kitchen sink full of hot water for ten minutes to bring it up to a more acceptable temperature, but taking it to the dining room the evening before serving is much better.

But back to our food and wine matching.  Regular readers of this column will know how much I enjoy pairing both everyday and even obscure dishes with a suitable wine.  I won’t say the ‘correct’ one, as that would be presumptuous.  For example at a recent dinner for some 40 guests I served a lightly chilled St Nicolas de Bourgueuil, a red Cabernet Franc from the Loire with seared salmon.  At first I could sense the consternation and then the pleasure of my fellow diners as they discovered just how perfect a match they made. Like all of us brought up to believe white with fish and red with meat they considered it wrong to serve a red wine, especially one that was chilled, with salmon.

Sadly we only had one fish dish, and this was  a Salmon Wellington, delicious creamy salmon and shrimp in a criss-crossed pastry crust.  This was successfully matched to an Italian rosé; a Pinot Grigio Ramato from around Venice that had been left on its skins for between 24 and 36 hours to attain a distinctive coppery colour.  It was also excellent with a relative newcomer, Vigne  St. Pierre from our very good friend Jean-Claude Mas from the d’Oc who creates this masterpiece by adding 5% Viognier to 95% crisp Sauvignon Blanc.

Lamb shank with rosemary and mint was a delight with a patrician Châteauneuf-du_Pape, while the beef with barbecue sauce was brought to life by a South African blend of  Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinotage.  Duck breasts in an orange sauce were truly succulent when accompanied by a Sancerre, but perhaps the surprise of the afternoon was putting our Australian Bushland Merlot Rosé with a pork chop with apple sauce.  I have since tried it with roast pork with plenty of crisp crackling and apple sauce from my own Bramley apples and it was, in the words of Michael Winner, ‘historic’.

Philippe Boucheron