The interplay between wine and food: why some pairings are a match made in heaven whilst others clash

Why do some pairings work and others clash? It’s a matter of taste, but also of chemistry. Just like on *Farmer Wants a Wife*. WINELIFE delves into the world of wine and food pairings.
Text: Marjolein Schuman | Image: ChatGPT

Few culinary relationships are as ancient, as much talked about and yet still as mysterious as that between wine and food. It’s almost like magic: you take a sip of wine after a mouthful of food, and suddenly something happens that is greater than the sum of its parts. An explosion of flavour you hadn’t expected. This has to do with personal taste (or rather, taste buds), just like the sensory enjoyment of art or sex.

But there is also a scientific side to food pairing. And that means you can predict which wine and food combinations work well. It’s actually just like how a winemaker already knows which aromas will emerge during the fermentation or ageing of wine. After all, it’s all down to chemical processes.

To put it simply: the terpenes present in grapes (geraniol, nerol, linalool) produce floral aromas, the chemical compound furaneol, which is produced during fermentation, gives red wine its strawberry aroma, whilst phenolic aldehydes, which emerge during ageing in oak barrels, impart a vanilla flavour to wines – a so-called tertiary aroma

The tradition of wine and cheese

From 3000 BC onwards, the nomadic way of life gave way to agriculture and livestock farming. Wine and cheese became staple foods in the Mediterranean diets of the Greeks and Romans. They would not have paired different types of cheese with different wines as we do today (Roquefort with Sauternes, mmm!), but ate whatever was locally available.

Cheese and wine were both agricultural products produced in the same regions, so it was only natural that they were consumed together. Add bread, figs and olives to the mix: we can see that the combination the Romans loved so much still finds its way onto our plates today.

Fancy reading more? You can in WINELIFE issue 102. You can buy it here.

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