Food & Wine Matching Made Simple by Mary Dowey

Mary Dowey writes the wine column for the Irish Times. She is also a regular contributor to Wine and Decanter magazines so it is only fitting that Ryland Peters & Small have snapped her up for Food & Wine Matching Made Simple.

Mary has a straightforward formula that providing you follow a set of simple rules about the principles of matching food and wine, you shouldn't go wrong. We all know that choosing the wrong wine can throw a dish out of kilter. Also the most expensive wine doesn't always match your food to perfection. In so many cases, the humblest dish and the humblest of wine can be the perfect match, hitting the rights notes in the alchemy of flavour.

Mary's key principles are:
Weight - light wines go with light foods.
Flavour - echo dominant flavours in a dish.
Regional clues - not surprisingly, wines from a particular region match dishes from the same region.
Opposites - serve simple foods against a back drop of fine wines and vice versa.

Once you have this formula in your mind, follow the book's simple format, which ranges food according to type and then offers several wine suggestions. If you were thinking of having Roquefort and wanted to serve a specific wine with it, choose a Bordeaux sweet wine such as a Sauternes or Barsac. Or if you are thinking of serving goose this Christmas, find a rich and appley German Riesling Spätlese or an Alsace Pinot Gris.

The lists at the back of the book, Most Flexible Food Wines, Restaurant Safe Bets and Top 20 Sensational Matches are useful if you find yourself cooking for large numbers or end up ordering wine in a restaurant. A word of advice though, it might be better to memorise these lists rather than pull out the book in situ. But you will find that with continued use of this book, you will gain a fuller understanding of this potentially difficult subject.

Food & Wine Matching Made Simple is geared towards the novice. However, you may well have found yourself faced with a dilemma when your resident wine sommelier has gone AWOL and you have to do some quick thinking. Turn to this book first and success should follow. Along with excellent photography, this book can only succeed.

Publication details:
64 pp. £8.99
Published by Ryland Peters & Small
ISBN 1841723444
2002

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