Holidays are about rituals: festive routines repeated year after year—so often we have long forgotten their origins. As a wine writer, one of my annual practices has been trying out novel takes on holiday food and wine pairing, itself a series of rituals with unfamiliar origins that can, with a little delving, begin to seem increasingly arbitrary.
A masterclass led by my fellow Master of Wine Tim Hanni, a man with a mile-wide contrarian streak, underlined this point. For one thing, what we consider “traditional pairing” is actually a fairly modern concept, even in France. For instance, the Larousse Gastronomique contained no food and wine pairing guidance until 1961 (hardly the hallowed days of old).
At this point, Tim said, “the BS began to overtake the science,” resulting in constantly evolving “rules.”…
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Tatler Hong Kong (Digital) - 1 Issue, December 2019