What do you make of all this talk about matching food and wine? Fast track to new levels of sensual bliss, or a fuss about nothing?
"Look," I heard an exasperated young winemaker say across a lunch-table in the Cape Winelands recently, "we've just had white wine with a beef salad, then red wine with fish, and everything tasted sensational. The old rules have all gone. You can drink whatever wine you like with whatever food you like."
"Matching food and wine - silly or sexy?" demanded a front-cover headline on Decanter magazine not so long ago. Inside, wine pundit Richard Neill adopted the same position as the anything-goes South African. "The sort of people who worry about what wine will go with what food are the sort who choose the colour of their toilet-roll to go with the bathroom wallpaper. The type that line up their CD collection in alphabetical order. Food and wine matching is the trainspotting of the wine world," he ranted. But Decanter's resident foodie, Fiona Beckett - photographed fetchingly with frying pan advancing towards Neill's head - struck right back. "What we food and wine matchers/pairers/ combiners - call us what you will - are interested in isn't tidying the world up, but making the gastronomic Earth move."
A tall order - but I'm on her side. Trying to pair various foods with suitable wines has more to do with having fun than being fussy. It's adventurous, rather than pretentious. Hit on the right bottle, even with the simplest dish - an omelette, say, or sausages and champ - and both the food and the wine taste terrific. Pick any old thing at random, and whether you're eating foie gras or fish and chips, it's unlikely to work any particular magic. Just for the record, the South African winemaker was a touch disingenuous about that lipsmacking lunch. The meat dish was a Thai beef salad - great with Semillon, but not any other white on the table. And the fish that went so well with a punchy Syrah was charged with chillies and spices - not your average, delicate, white fillet. So, sorry: the anything-with-everything argument just doesn't wash.
Now Fiona Beckett has put manners on what sometimes seems like a vexed subject. Eating and Drinking - an A-Z of Great Food and Drink Combinations isn't the most comprehensive tome on food and drink pairing I've ever come across; in fact, it rather looks as if it might have been hatched over a good lunch and written in the brief intervals between several more and dinner time. It's not the most scholarly, either. Very little talk about balancing elements such as sweetness, acidity and tannin. Thank goodness.
There are no long paragraphs to plough through while you're up to the elbows in fish-cake mixture and your significant other has to race to the off-licence for a suitable bottle before the guests arrive. Whip this paperback down off the kitchen shelf, and you'll see some good suggestions in a second. The foods are in very big type; the drink ideas in bold; the zingy lime and tangerine pages even wipe-able.
"It's a book for people who are really into food, but who maybe haven't thought about buying a wine book because they're not yet into wine in a big way," Beckett explains. Celebrity chef Antonio Carluccio reckons Beckett's tastebuds are among the best in Britain. Was she born with a brilliant palate? "I reckon I was probably born greedy! The great thing about wine is that the more you taste it, the sharper your tastebuds become. So you don't just taste Chardonnay, but all the different styles of Chardonnay. You develop a sense for matching certain wines with certain foods - just in the same way that, when you're cooking, you realise something needs a squeeze of lemon." For a veteran of happy pairings, did the compilation of Eating & Drinking spring any surprises? "We had another look at Chinese food and rather exploded the myth that aromatic or medium-dry white wines are best," Beckett recalls. "The very best wine was Chateau de Sours Rose - that was just fabulous. (See below). But Beaujolais is also remarkably good."
For sheer hedonistic pleasure, she singles out two favourite matches. One is oysters and Chablis. "It's been around for ever, I know, but it's a great, great combination - provided, of course, that you like oysters. Both have the same mineral character, the same tangy freshness." The other is chocolate and sweet red wines. "Wonderfully decadent."
But, as this book demonstrates, simple dishes can suddenly turn exciting in the presence of a well-chosen bottle. "Try fish and chips with any crisp, lemony white - a Sauvignon from Touraine, Chile or South Africa. A slightly more eccentric combination which I also love is bacon and eggs with a basic red Bordeaux."
Fiona Beckett is refreshingly down-to-earth. At home of an evening: "We don't have anguished discussions along the lines of What Shall We Pluck from the Cellar Tonight. If my husband's cooking, I'll stick a finger in the pot, say mmm, I think I know what might go with that, and have a root around. Usually there's a bottle somewhere that will suit."
Eating & Drinking reflects contemporary eating habits more than any other book on the subject I've come across so far. "I was very keen that it should be about the kind of food we eat now - not things like chicken chasseur and consomme," Beckett says. So you'll find entries such as Mexican, Moroccan, Cajun, doner kebabs, blinis, guacamole and Keylime pie alongside basics such as lamb, beef, salmon, eggs, mushrooms and Christmas pudding.
Eating & Drinking - an A-Z of Great Food and Drink Combinations by Fiona Beckett is published by Mitchell Beazley, price £8.99 in the UK