The news came as no surprise, but it is welcome to have confirmation of one’s opinions nonetheless. If you have even a passing interest in the glorious pantomime that is haute cuisine, you must have heard that back in the depths of the pandemic Eleven Madisson Park, a New York City flagbearer for the sector, switched to a vegan-only menu. And now, well, it is changing back. One of the reasons, apparently, is that wine drinkers will only shell out for the really pricey bottles if meat is involved. For most people it seems, Bordeaux does go with steak. Aubergine can make do with a Nero d’ Avola.

Fear not, this is not another piece on the food-and-wine matching wars. I gave my thoughts on that a couple of autumns back in these web pages, and I haven’t changed my mind since. If you are after a more recent exchange, Alder Yarrow and Fiona Beckett traded courteous blows on this for the Decanter.

What interests me today, instead, is why so many wine professionals are dismissive of food and wine pairing. Not only the wine writers Fiona talks about in Decanter, but also winemakers, wine merchants, and, gulp, sommeliers – for whom one would think food and wine matching is fairly high up in the job description. The dismissal of the activity isn’t a rhetorical flourish either, it is actual everyday practice. These are people that know the theory, indeed make a living out of it, and regularly get to experience it in high calibre settings, going to great restaurants, treated to thoughtful tasting menus. If they call BS, maybe it is. Or maybe, I posit, there are other factors at play.

A benign one is objecting, or pretending to object, to a perceived simplicity of the prescriptions. In music theory class, teachers often say that you need to learn all the rules, so you can then go on and break them. But it is a very rare person that gets an immediate, intuitive understanding of all the collected human knowledge on something and can go straight to innovation. I have lost count of the somms who have told me how they matched fish with red wine like it’s some sort of flex (me, I’m just grateful for their ideas, which I occasionally try out). Of course you can perfectly well match fish with red wine under certain conditions, and any elaborate discussion on the topic will cover how. But if you need to give broad advice, most red wine will be less suitable for most fish dishes than most white wine most of the time for most people. You’re welcome to use this qualifying mouthful if you prefer – or simplify to “white wine with fish”.

A darker aspect is that the wine trade seems to breed a certain nihilism to many. Most people hate their jobs to some extent but there does seem to be more of it in the high end of the wine industry. Maybe it is that selling overpriced wine means dealing primarily with the entitled rich. Maybe it is that success in selling overpriced anything inherently relies on smoke and mirrors, which must eventually take a toll. Maybe it is that the wine industry sells a myth to its recruits, that hard work and study will bring some sort of success, that someone will one day pay you a lot of money for memorising the German wine classification system. Or maybe it is that it’s a cut-throat industry, which can often feel cruel and unfair. Women seem wicked, when you are unwanted, Jim Morisson sang. Wine looks bullshit, when you are sacked, one could add.

I suspect, however, that most wine professionals fall on neither end of this spectrum. Instead, they are simply too close to their subject of expertise to stop and smell the proverbial roses. A winemaker, wine critic, or wine seller doesn’t taste wine primarily as a source of pleasure or as an occasional treat, but as a job. The analytical considerations that cross their minds when tasting are many and varied, from worrying about hints of volatile acidity to weighing if it would fly off a list at this price. The stimulants are just too many to worry if it’s a good match for the béchamel sauce.

It reminds me of an interview with Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. In this, Feynman, who, like many scientists, could be very touchy about having his cultural credentials questioned, goes on a side rant about an artist friend. The friend’s crime is thinking that scientists know too much about a flower to be able to appreciate it as an aesthetic object. Feynman disagrees, strongly, and goes off describing all the ways his scientific knowledge enhances what he gets out of the flower. I enjoy the clip and I have watched it many times. Every time I leave satisfied that Feynman derived a great amount of pleasure from his understanding of the flower, all the hard-earned scientific truths, the multiple dimensions that remain hidden to most people. It’s just that I have never been convinced that Feynman cares in the slightest about the simple aesthetic pleasure of looking at a pretty flower. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge comes with a cost. I’m sure there is a story about it somewhere.

Photo by Andrew Small on Unsplash