A guide to pairing problem foods with perfect wines

Food and wine matching, or pairing as it’s often called, has become an increasingly popular sport. I admire the practitioners, while being far from hardline on the subject myself.

Wine is complicated enough and I have always been reluctant to add an extra layer of complication. In practice, I find it’s possible to drink virtually any wine with any food. If there really is a bit of a clash, then usually it can be mitigated by taking a mouthful of water or something neutral or absorbent such as bread in between the food and the wine.

The only time I expect pairing perfection is in a tip-top restaurant with a professional sommelier, who should know the dishes well enough to be able to recommend an ideal wine at three different price levels.

But there are some foods that distort the palate to such an extent that they really are extremely difficult to match with wine.

Globe artichokes are the most obvious example. They have the immediate effect on most people of making things taste oddly sweet and metallic. As Victoria Moore points out in her comprehensive guide to pairing, The Wine Dine Dictionary, when you’re eating a globe artichoke, it’s such a demanding process, and the leaves themselves are quite juicy, you don’t really need to drink anything with it.

Grilled artichoke hearts, a deli delight, aren’t quite as palate-deforming. Moore recommends wines with texture: orange wines, slightly bitter Italian whites or a light, pale sherry. I’ve tried all of these and found a manzanilla and fino went beautifully, especially one of the unfiltered, young en rama versions. Riesling was a real clash.

It’s the season for asparagus, another vegetable accused of being difficult to match with wine. There’s a doctrinal divide between asparagus connoisseurs. For Germans, asparagus has to be fat and white, and the conventional partner is dry (“trocken”) German Riesling or Silvaner, the characteristic wine grape of the Franken region that is widely underestimated. Rudolf May makes a range of beautiful Silvaners, many of which are imported into the UK by Howard Ripley.

For most Brits, asparagus should be bright green and thinner. It too can go well with a dry German Riesling, of which there is such a choice nowadays.

Sauvignon Blanc is often considered a suitable accompaniment for green asparagus. Lesser or older New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs can actually taste of canned asparagus. But for this essentially springlike vegetable, I think a really fresh Sauvignon-like wine is preferable. Many a Friuli dry white has a certain “greenness” to its flavour. Those with Sauvignon or Friulano grapes in the mix can be a good friend to green asparagus.

Another obvious enemy of wine is chilli and other red-hot spices that assault, even numb, the palate. Lager does its cooling work well, arguably better than water. But if it has to be wine, a sweetish, bold red such as those listed here can work better than more classic, structured, dry reds that taste even more austere once the palate has been bludgeoned by a spicy dish. Really fruity whites and rosés can work too.

Wine and cheese is seen as a sacrosanct combination. Americans often serve it before a meal, Europeans towards the end, or as a light meal on its own. Whether before or after a dessert can be a domestic flashpoint. I favour before because it seems logical to follow a savoury main course with something savoury before ending with something sweet. Traditionally, red wine has been served with cheese, perhaps just carrying on with the red wine served with the main course (so not calling for a new glass), but many of those who take note of how food and wine interact argue that white wine is much more suitable.

Just to make things even more complicated, cheeses themselves vary enormously in character and their impact on the palate. I’d argue that it’s almost impossible to find one wine that would go with a really diverse cheeseboard. And anyway it can be preferable to serve just one cheese in perfect condition, certainly if you seek pairing perfection.

Hard, salty cheeses such as cheddar, mimolette and cantal go pretty well with dry reds but white wines are often a better bet with many other cheeses. Sweeter hard cheeses, such as comté, beaufort, emmental and gouda, can be better with lively whites, even a full-bodied white burgundy or other Chardonnay. Gouda can make a red wine taste metallic, but goes surprisingly well with a fruity rosé.

Fresh goat’s milk cheese and Sancerre, or other bone-dry Sauvignon Blanc, is a widely recognised successful combination, and the wines that I recommended for green asparagus go well too. But as chèvre ages, it becomes increasingly salty and probably calls for a richer white. Sweet and salt go well together (think of ham and melon, port and stilton), as witness the fact that sweet whites are the perfect foil for creamy blue cheeses such as roquefort. Super-creamy St-Félicien is lovely with medium-sweet wines such as Vouvray, Alsace Vendange Tardive wines or a Riesling Spätlese.

But gorgonzola, like brie, camembert and Baron Bigod from Suffolk in England, is a soft-ripened cheese that presents real challenges for wine pairings. These creamy cheeses coat the palate and, in the case of brie and camembert, can sometimes smell of ammonia, depending on their age. Aldo Sohm, the celebrated Austrian sommelier at Le Bernardin in New York, recommends champagne or calvados in his book Wine Simple — though I’m not sure that one wants to inject champagne so late into a menu.

Fiona Beckett, a writer who has specialised in food and wine matching, is also a fan of going local, and recommends a good Norman cider or young calvados with camembert. With brie and Baron Bigod, she suggests a fruity Pinot Noir. I also asked my colleague Tamlyn Currin what she recommends. She takes a keen interest in pairings, and her suggestion of a fresh, fruity Beaujolais worked well when I tried it, as did Moore’s Provençal rosé.

I know that champagne, often dry and tart, is served with dessert in many French households but I’ve never found this a happy combination. Much better with sweet food is sweet wine, but it has to be a wine that is sweeter than the food, otherwise the pudding will make the wine taste too acid.

Rather like soft-ripened cheese, chocolate typically coats the palate and can be a real challenge for wine pairing. Any wine served with chocolate has to be really, really sweet and strong enough to stand up to the power of chocolate. Perfect are the vins doux naturels of Roussillon such as Rivesaltes and Banyuls. A new cache of sumptuous Rivesaltes, from 1980 back to 1955, has been unearthed in the cellar of Domaine St-Michel for importers Farr Vintners in London. Like madeira, such wines usefully last for months in an opened bottle, which can provide 20 or more servings.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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