Hi,
I was struck by a sudden thought last night on the topic of food and wine matching, a subject which, being a vegetarian, I am not at all knowledgeable.
It occurs to me that there is, in the UK at least, a something of a cult mindset which says kind of says that wine is the "proper" thing to drink with a meal, and that having a bottle with your food will greatly enhance the respectability and romance of the occasion. You can see this attitude carried to its zenith by the fact you can get a wine list in most Indian and Thai restaurants where the style of cuisine on offer makes a very poor match with wine indeed.
However it seems to me that this is generally a really bad idea to hold as a generic rule. Depending on what you're eating then a beer, cider or lager of some sort might be a better bet. Even if you've got something on the table that has the potential to go with wine then the chances are that most people, who pick wine on a varietal/producer they like rather than the food match, will have picked a bad wine. If it's a fairly cheap wine then the chances are that it might well not match anything you could serve. The result is that the enjoyment of both wine and meal are slightly reduced.
I assume this mindset has come about because upper-class people, who have intentionally or unintentionally dictated the "proper" way to behave and who can afford the time and money to match the very best wines with what they eat, tend to have wine with a meal. It's thus become the accepted "posh" way of doing things. But the more I consider it, the more it seems an extraordinarily bad idea.
Is there any truth in this? If so, is it something that we, as wine enthusiasts, ought to be making some effort to correct?
