Well, thankfully, it wasn’t exactly the Hatfields and McCoys, but there was some heat generated in the Decanter-hosted debate between wine/food pairing expert Fiona Beckett and wine blogger Alder Yarrow. Alder has long insisted that wine and food pairing is nonsense.
He doesn’t pull his punches:
Thinking about, talking about, writing about, and – God help us – actually attempting food and wine pairing is the single greatest waste of time and energy in the entire world of wine.
I have always been puzzled by this animus toward food and wine pairing. But what is peculiar is I agree with almost everything Alder says yet cannot find anything in his premises that supports his conclusion. I say I agree with almost everything. There is one howler that sits in the middle of his screed that needs attention. He writes:
Modern research has shown that the saliva in your mouth – yes, your spit – unlocks a unique pattern of aroma compounds that is statistically different to what someone else’s saliva will produce. That’s right: science has definitively proven that we all taste the same wine differently.
Now throw in personal preferences, lived experiences, what you’ve already eaten that day, your mood, how well you slept, the ambient lighting, who you’re drinking with and, yes, even the music playing (science says that affects wine perception, too), and the idea that anyone could declare how a wine will taste to someone else – let alone how it will taste alongside a forkful of flavours and whether they’ll actually enjoy it – is laughably absurd.
He knows better than this. He does review wines after all. What would be the point if we all taste the same wine differently.
Here is the problem. He is right that saliva modulates aroma release and texture perceptions, and that biological input differs among people. But that does not entail that perception is radically idiosyncratic, still less that prediction is impossible. Many inputs vary while outputs remain patterned enough to make an inference. People have radically different prescriptions for eyeglasses, and visual patterns will differ from person to person even after correction. But it’s the same stop sign they see. “Statistically different” means group-level distributions are not identical; it does not mean there is no overlap between taster’s experiences. That overlap is exactly what allows shared descriptors, wine education, and intersubjective agreement to exist.
No doubt people have different preferences and all the contextual factors that Alder mentions influence what we taste. But that still allows coarse but reliable predictions because we’re talking about probabilities not absolutes. Most people will want Cabernet Sauvignon rather than Sauvignon Blanc with a big steak. Surely not everyone but enough to make some defeasible generalizations about what most people enjoy. If food and wine preferences were utterly capricious, food and wine education wouldn’t work, sommeliers couldn’t help guests, and blind tasting would be a coin toss. It isn’t.
What the data on food and wine preferences show is that we should have some epistemic humility. Our claims should be probabilistic claims and our guidance should be audience relative, not a ban on making any claims at all.
This of course means that Alder is exactly right when he says we should not be telling people they are wrong about what they like. Some people will fall outside the normal range without having made some kind of mistake. Wine and food professionals who make recommendations need to proceed with that aforementioned humility. No one can guarantee a private “qualia-state.” The best they can do is suggest the most likely sensory experience and hedonic range for most palates under typical conditions.
Thus, Alder is exactly right when he writes:
The so-called rules of food and wine pairing are, at best, junk science – vestigial dogma from a stiffer, starchier age, when self-appointed gatekeepers told us what to drink and delivered categorical diktats on what went with what, and what did not.
Food and wine pairing is surely not a science. And the “so-called rules” are so riddled with exceptions that they are at best suggestions about what is likely to work—not rules. Again, they are defeasible generalizations based on probabilities. But this is what makes food and wine pairing fun. If it were simply a matter of applying a rule, then it wouldn’t be worth thinking about. So when he writes: “Explore. Mix. Match. Clash, even. Figure out what you like,” I say bravo. That sense of exploration is precisely what food and wine pairing is about. But of course if you are going to explore, mix, and match you have to attempt food and wine pairing, not ignore it.
Thus, it makes little sense to say you should ignore experts. If you take some original guidance from them (assuming they are genuine experts) the probabilities will likely be on your side. But just remember there is lots of room for failure—probability functions are like that.
The good thing about food and wine pairing is that even a pairing that isn’t great will almost always be good enough. It’s easy to ignore the lack of a good match and just use the wine as a palate cleanser. It is not something to excessively worry about.
As for Ms. Beckett, she acquits herself well. She writes:
Suggestions, note. The big – and yes, pernicious – myth is that those of us who enjoy matching wine and food, and want others to enjoy it, too, are being prescriptive. That we want to impose rules. That there is only one ‘correct’ match. Which is manifestly not the case any more than that there is a single way of making a recipe that you absolutely have to follow. If you disagree with a cookery writer’s take on a dish, you don’t argue all recipes are pointless. You just choose someone else’s version with whom your taste is more in accord.
Precisely!
Exploring the Philosophy of Food and Wine 