Fiano for the win! Very interesting. Thanks for taking the time to post all of this, Jim. This part didn’t surprise me at all:
I found that wines that had this taste profile in a more “sophisticated” and subtle way, and were really nice wines by themselves, sometimes lost their finer qualities a bit with our fairly robust pesto. So, the more modest bottlings from good producers seemed to be a better choice for our basil pesto; they seemed to have more exuberance and less subtlety, which might also describe our basil pesto.
I don’t think this is limited to garlic-heavy pesto. Any great white wine has a lot of subtle nuance, even if that’s not everything the wine is about. I think those subtleties are automatically toned down or lost (mostly lost) with a food like pesto. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy wine with pesto, but it does mean I won’t generally open my best wines to have with it if it’s the main part of a meal. Sometimes the wine really can’t be the star, and that’s just fine.