Two things constantly perplex me on this board, and maybe I just don’t understand something correctly, so I thought I’d throw it out there.
First, everyone falls all over themselves to proclaim that they drink wine with food, they want wines to complement food, food food food. But even when you have wine generally with food, what percentage of the wine you consume actually occurs adjacent to a bite from your plate? When you’re not at some grand restaurant tasting dinner - say you’re splitting a bottle with your spouse over weeknight dinner - how long do you typically eat, and do you consume the whole bottle during that time?
It seems to me that even when you share wine over dinner, the majority of that wine isn’t consumed right before or after a bite of food. You drink some while you’re preparing your food, and you drink some after dinner is over. In my ordinary home dinner, the actual start to finish eating dinner part often lasts 10-20 minutes (I have 6 and 10 year old kids, and I work during the day). Is this most other people’s experience? If not, is it that (a) you spend long, leisurely times most days eating dinner, and you can fit all your wine within that time, or (b) you drink either very little or very quickly so the whole experience falls between the beginning and end of your dinner?
Second, when we have food-wine pairing threads on this board, almost every one has the same chorus: drink non-Chardonnay white varietals (the more obscure the better), drink rose, drink sparkling wine, or drink beer. Maybe an occasional vote for Beaujolais or something like Dolcetto. It’s the same if you ask about ham, Korean food, salmon, Thanskgiving, cheese, chocolate, pizza, or schnitzel; almost nobody ever says cab, syrah, pinot noir, chardonnay, merlot, sauvignon blanc, or zinfandel (except me). And as mentioned above, everyone is also very insistent they drink wine with meals.
But I’m going to guess, conservatively, that the whites, roses, sparklers, and dolcetto/gamay type reds that are the overwhelming response to every food-wine thread constitute probably less than 10% of the wine we Berserkers drink in the aggregate. Read threads about wine, read tasting notes, and most of us drink the usual suspects, the wines that nobody (again, except me) suggests that people drink with their meals.
Is that answer (a) that most of us only eat the most mainstream and conservative wine-pairing cuisine, like Continental and wine country cuisine, and thus we can have our pinots, cabs and syrahs to pair with them, (b) that there is a huge discrepancy between what we say people should pair with food and what we actually open when we sit down to eat ourselves, or (c) something else?
I’m interested for any thoughts or explanations. I acknowledge in advance that I may just not be understanding what people are trying to say on these points. Cheers. ![cheers [cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif)