The Rules That Hold

Coq au vin. Boeuf bourguignon. Oeufs en meurette: poached eggs in a red wine sauce. Jambon persillé. Gougères.

These are not arbitrary regional specialities that happen to be served with the local wine. They developed alongside it, share its register, and are built from the same materials: reduction, fat, bacon, mushrooms, onions, and in several cases the wine itself.

The result is a set of pairings that work for reasons a taster can articulate. Red Burgundy has moderate tannin, high acidity and, with age, a savoury earthy character of mushroom and undergrowth. A dish built on lardons, butter and mushrooms meets it directly rather than competing with it.

Which points at the principles underneath, and there are fewer of them than the literature suggests.

Weight first. A delicate wine disappears behind an intense dish and a powerful wine obliterates a delicate one, and no amount of clever flavour matching rescues either failure. The familiar red-with-meat convention is a rough proxy for weight, and it fails constantly. Chablis with roast chicken is excellent, and a village red with a rich fish dish frequently works.

Acidity second, and this is the most reliable single variable there is. Acidity cuts fat and refreshes the palate, and a wine with less acidity than the dish tastes flat and heavy alongside it. Burgundy's affinity with classical French cooking, which is built on butter and cream, is substantially this.

Sweetness third, and it is where most pairings actually fail. Sweetness in the food raises the apparent acidity and bitterness of a dry wine and strips out its fruit. A good red Burgundy alongside anything glazed, barbecued or sweet-sauced will read as thin and sour, and the bottle has done nothing wrong. Salt does the reverse and softens a wine, which is why a salty cheese flatters a red that seemed austere on its own.

The rule about red wine and fish has an actual mechanism, which is more interesting than the rule.

Japanese researchers at Mercian identified iron as the variable. Wines higher in iron content produced a strong unpleasant fishy aftertaste when tasted with scallops; low-iron wines did not, and the effect could be reproduced by adding iron to a wine that had previously been fine. The mechanism appears to involve iron catalysing the oxidation of fish lipids.

So it is about iron rather than tannin, which explains why some reds manage fish perfectly well and why the rule has always had obvious exceptions.

There is one more variable, and it is the cheapest available improvement anybody can make.

Red Burgundy is routinely served far too warm. Room temperature meant something different in an unheated nineteenth-century dining room; at twenty degrees the alcohol dominates and the aromatics flatten. Fourteen to sixteen suits it, which means twenty minutes in a fridge for most bottles in most houses.

White Burgundy is routinely served far too cold, straight from a fridge at four degrees, at which point it smells of almost nothing. It opens considerably as it warms in the glass, which is why the second glass so often seems better than the first; the wine has not changed, its temperature has.

Temperature is free, immediate and neglected, and getting it right does more for most bottles than anything else on this list.

And then Epoisses, which deserves its own note. The local washed-rind cheese, washed in marc de Bourgogne, is powerful enough to defeat nearly every red wine including the great ones. The regional answer is white Burgundy, or the marc itself. It is a useful reminder that even a set of pairings developed together over centuries contains a case where the obvious move does not work.