This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
I once sat next to two men at Brasserie Zédel in London happily tucking into their steak frites. Nothing odd about that but what was peculiar was their choice of wine to accompany: Sauternes.
Sweet wine with red meat, it’s a bold combination. In an age when we are all supposed to be obsessed with food pairing, there’s something heroic about such nonchalant indifference to conventional thinking.
Interest in food pairing, finding the right wine to go with a specific dish, has exploded in recent years. Newspapers, blogs and especially social media accounts are full of advice on how to find the perfect match between wine and dish.
At most upmarket restaurants you will be offered a wine to go with each course of the tasting menu. I remember doing this once at L’Enclume in Cumbria and I could barely walk at the end of the evening, let alone drive home.
It’s such a staple of going out now that it’s difficult to comprehend that for around 6,000 years, people would generally have drunk any wine with anything.
At Trimalchio’s feast in Petronius’s Satyricon, the guests drank 100-year-old Falernian with every dish, from whole wild boar filled with live thrushes to dormice glazed with honey and poppy seeds. Just think what fun a modern sommelier would have had with those.
The most prized wines of antiquity, and well into the modern age, were sweet. In medieval times there was no division between sweet and savoury. This began to change in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries as sugary things were gradually moved into a separate dessert sphere.
The biggest change, however, was the shift in the 19th century from service à la française, everything on the table at once, to service à la russe, individual courses. Looking at old menus on the walls of Berry Bros. & Rudd from the early 20th century, you can see that specific wines now went with certain courses. In theory, at least.
In reality, the old cavalier attitude persisted. There’s not a hint of food pairing in the writing of Lieutenant Colonel Newnham-Davis, a former British army officer who reviewed restaurants for the Pall Mall Gazette in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Largely, he sticks to champagne when dining out with other men’s wives at Claridge’s, the Savoy or Simpson’s in the Strand. He wrote: “Ninety-nine out of a hundred Englishmen, in ordering a little dinner for two, turn instinctively to the champagne page of the wine-card.”
In 1901 a newspaper columnist lamenting the decline of sherry wrote: “Champagne is drunk through a dinner with port at the finish. It is quite a common thing at the best dinner tables to see only two glasses laid, one for champagne, the other for port.”
Yet it was around this time that some rules of thumb began to emerge for what to drink with what: white burgundy with fish, claret with beef and port with stilton. All good, sound advice. I am not going to argue that certain wines don’t suit certain dishes: tannins bind with fat, sweet wines make salty things taste less salty, and acidity stimulates the appetite.
The problem comes when recommendations become over-specific, suggesting that an exact vintage is the perfect match for an elaborate dish, whilst ignoring that everyone’s palate and olfactory system are different. On one wine retailer’s website I saw that the serving suggestion for one wine was “barely-seared albacore with green zebra tomato salsa”.
I have a theory that the growth of food pairing menus aligns almost exactly with the rise of the smartphone. Thanks to apps, you can find out about wines on the list without consulting the waiter. Whilst you might be able to find out what score Jancis Robinson gave the wine, only the sommelier knows how it is going to react to the chef’s latest masterpiece. Food and wine matching is a way of propping up the sommelier’s status as keeper of arcane knowledge. Plus, adding a wine to each course is a great way to get people to spend much more money without really thinking about it. Most British restaurants make more money from the wine rather than the food.
But not all. It’s telling that one of the best restaurants in England, The Sportsman at Seasalter, doesn’t offer food pairing. Instead, they have a simple wine list supplied by the local brewery, so most customers have a Sancerre or Picpoul throughout the meal.
The food is undoubtedly expensive, but you can have it with a pint of stout if you want. With elaborate food, simple drinks are often best.
Trying to find the perfect wine for each course is madness, especially when everyone is having something different. But more than this, it’s boring. Worrying about whether the wine suits the food adds another layer of complication to an occasion that is supposed to be convivial. Tasting menus can be pretty arduous without adding a wine for each course. Just as you’re beginning to relax, the waiter will interrupt to tell you all about the food, and then the sommelier will interrupt to tell you about the wine. This is then repeated for every bloody dish.
My advice is to take a leaf out of Newnham-Davis’s book and stick to one wine throughout the meal, and if that’s Sauternes, then go for it. Whatever floats your boat.
