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It was like a chemistry experiment in my mouth. One of the ones where you mix two things that look entirely harmless and everything suddenly starts going mental. If you don’t know what I mean, mix some bicarbonate of soda with laundry detergent and a bit of water to make a thick solution. Stand back and admire how dull and entirely bereft of action it appears. Now chuck in some vinegar and hide behind the sofa before the resulting explosion takes your head off see how it bubbles a bit. It was a sensation more surprising for being completely unexpected, like biting into an apparently standard chocolate cake and finding that it’s full of popping candy. Bad popping candy. Evil, mouth-assaulting, nasty popping candy.

Just like those chemistry experiments there were two principal ingredients. The first was a daal, an Indian preparation of pulses. On its own it seemed entirely benign, with little discernible chilli heat and instead delivering waves of mellow, gentle fruitfulness. It really was a tremendously good daal. The second was a German pinot noir, or spatburgunder as they have it there, from Bernhard Huber. Again, on its own it was bright, fruity, full of cherry-zapped freshness and low in tannins. But eat some daal and then, when it’s just gone down, sip the wine, and your mouth turns into a fiery cauldron, like you’d accidentally ingested a mouthful of tiny but very wild tannic chilli assault-gnomes.

As I’ve previously said once or twice I’m not one for getting bogged down in the minutiae of wine and food matching, but I do think it’s worth avoiding absolute howlers. The unusual thing about this particular howler, however, is that the food and the wine were served together not, as you might assume, by a total idiot at a backstreet curry house but at a posh dinner at a top restaurant, a dinner designed to illustrate how well German wines match with Indian food (you may recall that not too long ago I wrote about a dinner designed to illustrate how well German wines match with Scandinavian food. You may deduce from this that the German wine people want the world to know how well their wine goes with a variety of cuisines, and you would be right). The location was the Cinnamon Club, round the corner from the Houses of Parliament, and the host was Jeannie Cho Lee, the Hong Kong-based Master (Mistress?) of Wine, who insisted that she would be happy to serve tannic wine with spicy food – so long as the person doing the eating and drinking was used to handling the spice. “It extends the sensation of heat,” she said, “but it’s fine if that’s your kind of thing.” What amazed me, as someone who isn’t used to handling the spice, was that it didn’t just extend the sensation of heat, it created it when none existed previously. This was a serious beverage fail.

The traditional British accompaniment to Indian food is lager, which quenches the thirst well enough but does little to douse the fiery flames caused by the ambitiously-ordered vindaloo. The correct accompaniment to Indian food, at least if you’ve got a slightly shy western palate like my own, is white wine that isn’t dry. Even if you’re having a venison curry, and everything you’ve ever read in the wine-and-food-matching rulebook about drinking wine with venison is screaming RED at you in a shrill voice, white wine goes best. Believe me – I’ve tried it. German labels are all sorts of complicated, but look for a spätlese Riesling, or go French with a demi-sec or a moelleux chenin blanc from Vouvray in the Loire Valley, or a rosé fruité of the sort you get by the pichet-full in unfussy provencal bistrots (but, unhelpfully, not many other places) for a couple of euros.

And if you want to know Jeannie Cho Lee’s basic rules for matching wine with Asian food (and I’ve filtered out absolutely all of the nuance in her detailed and well-thought-through presentation, because if you’re that interested you should just buy her book, or at least check out her website), they are these: 1) Because many Asian meals are composed of loads of different little mini-dishes all consumed at the same time, versatility is key – you can’t hit a nail on the head if you’re aiming at lots of nails and only have one hammer. I’m paraphrasing here, obviously. 2) So pick something cold, white and refreshing and everyone will be happy.

High Timber is a South African restaurant delicately perched on the north side of the Millennium Bridge, close enough to one of London’s landmark river crossings for diners to enjoy a delightful walk from the South Bank without the need to negotiate traffic, yet far enough away for it to be all-but impossible to actually find. I went on the night of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, which had been conducted round the corner at St Paul’s Cathedral earlier, and feared the place would be full of FW de Klerk and his chums, coming down from the emotional fireworks of the service in the company of some steaks and the occasional boerewors. Instead it was at best half-full; perhaps they’d got lost.

It was a night not just for eating South African, but drinking South African. A handful of wine merchants were there too, and had brought some of their favourite themed offerings, and we sat along the length of a generously-proportioned table and helped ourselves. The food was OK, and not enormous. The wine was excellent, and extremely plentiful. This left all present in a dangerous predicament, and I didn’t handle it well. I’ll cut a long story short: reader, I got drunk.

The cheapest wine on the table cost £10.75 a bottle, more than twice the average price of a bottle of South African wine sold in the UK (which was £4.68 the last time I looked, though there’s been another tax hike since). The most expensive costs a shade under £60 (the thrillingly good Mullineux Schist syrah). We got, in short, the good stuff. Most of the whites were blends taking chenin blanc as a given and then throwing in anything else that was handy at the time – sauvignon blanc, viognier, clairette blanche, chardonnay, rousanne and semillon all made an appearance in supporting roles. Some of these whites were very good indeed. The reds were fairly evenly divided between Bordeaux-style blends and syrah-dominated blends, with just one example of South Africa’s signature grape, pinotage.

(The pinotage was produced under the label Elemental Bob, the side project of Spookfontein winemaker Craig Sheard, who puts crystals in his wine barrels to improve their energy, or somesuch. It’s made in tiny quantities – just 400 bottles – and has a good story but I fear is one of those wines which is immeasurably improved by meeting its maker, and otherwise seems a bit expensive at £25.)

Wines of the night, then: I liked the Cape Point Isleidh white blend, a sauvignon/semillon that costs £31.99 from SAWinesOnline.co.uk; Cartology, a chenin/semillon blend that is refined, mineral, complex and very good value if you can find it at around £22-£23, and Mullineux white blend, a chenin/clairette/viognier (the latter, though just 9% of the blend, seemed to the fore) also very good value at £13. Of the reds, MR de Compostella, a blend of equal parts merlot, cabernet franc and cabernet sauvignon, with merlot and petit verdot sharing the last quarter of the blend, struck a fine balance between fruit and structure (£39, Handford wines), that expensive Mullineux syrah (their basic syrah is also excellent, for a similar price as the white), and the one I kept coming back to, BLANKbottle black, mostly syrah with a bit of other stuff, a soft, welcoming and all-round excellent wine from the fashionable Swartland (£25, or £23.75 by the case, Stone, Vine & Sun). The label, unsurprisingly given the wine’s name, is almost entirely black. The venue, I’m afraid, was almost entirely dark. This picture is the best I could do. If you’re unimpressed I do recommend that you buy some yourself and take your own photographs, it really is phenomenally drinkable.

At the end of last week the real, proper wine writer Lettie Teague, writing in the actual, genuine Wall Street Journal, published an article about wine blogs, at the end of which she picked her five favourites. She’s American, her paper is American, the very great majority of her readers are American, and four of her chosen favourites were American too. From the entire rest of the world she picked one, and it was me.

I knew she might be writing about me – she’d been in touch by email, said she liked the blog, and asked me a few questions about it, and myself. But I also feel I have a decent sense of my place in the world. If I was going to be one of her selections, how many selections would there be? Surely no less than 20, I reasoned. WSJ wouldn’t want many more, even for a web-only piece; I surely wouldn’t be in there if there were to be fewer. When the article appeared, and I was one of five … well … I must admit it blew my little mind. And it also got my father quite excited, which is quite a feat in itself.

Inevitably, lots of people visited that weekend to check me out. Equally inevitably, many of them won’t be back. To any repeat visitors who first found me through that article: welcome. I hope you stick around. Hopefully we can have some fun together.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been talked through the basic rules of food and wine matching, each occasion more infuriating than the last. It’s not that there’s no truth in it, it’s just largely irrelevant. And the amount that some people go on about it is not just tiresome – I’m certain that it puts many people off wine entirely, stops many more from enjoying their wine, or leaves them feeling guilty if they do.

Sod the lot of them. Eat what you want. Drink what you want.

The first and most important question when considering a wine and food match is this: how many people are eating and drinking? If the answer is two, and in my house it normally is, then go no further. You will spend 10 minutes eating your food, and all evening, perhaps two evenings, on the wine. Make sure it’s a wine you want to drink; if you don’t like the way it tastes with your food, stop drinking it until you’ve finished the food. It’s OK.

If four or more of you are eating and drinking, then it’s theoretically both feasible and reasonable to attempt a good match. Now here’s problem two: it’s not hard to find a wine that will form a reasonable relationship with your food, but though the perfect match does exist, it’s bastard hard to achieve, requiring a detailed knowledge not just of the food, its ingredients and its method of preparation, but also of the wine itself. The key issue is this: I (and most people) rarely get more than a couple of bottles of any one wine, so when I pluck a bottle from my wine, um, cupboard, I’m to a certain extent in the dark: though I can hazard a guess at what it will taste like based on where it comes from and what it’s made of, I don’t really know until it’s open. And once it’s open I’m having it, whether it’s a perfect match or a useless one.

It’s hard to find a proper wine person who is quite so dismissive of the art of food and wine matching as myself. Which makes Mark de Vere something of a personal hero. He’s from Oxford, is entitled to suffix his name with the initials MW, which means he knows his wine, and works in California for Constellation Brands, the people behind Ravenswood’s zinfandels, Manischewitz kosher wine, Corona lager and lots of other booze, though he concentrates on Robert Mondavi. That’s him at the top of the page.

He’s also an original thinker when it comes to food and wine matching. And his original thought is this: don’t worry about the wine – just choose whatever you like – worry about the food. If the food has been properly prepared – specifically, if salt and acid are in some degree of equilibrium – your wine will taste just fine. It will taste like it’s supposed to taste, and that’s the main thing. He proved this to me once, by serving me a load of totally unseasoned food (that’s it above) and making me drink wine with it, and watching my displeasure. And then by encouraging me to squeeze lemon and sprinkle salt upon the food (that’s it below), and making me drink wine again, and smiling knowingly at my sudden enthusiastic nodding. Red wine and fish; white wine and steak – it’s all good. So long as you choose the wine you want to drink, and the food you want to eat, happiness is guaranteed. “Choose the wine you like, taste it, taste your food, and if it doesn’t taste right, add lemon and salt, and the wine will taste the way it’s supposed to,” he says. “It’s that simple.”

It’s a beautifully straightforward philosophy, and with plates of food based round slabs of protein I’m convinced that it works. It won’t turn sauvignon blanc into the best possible match for a rare T-bone steak, but if what you want with your T-bone is sauvignon blanc it will allow both beef and booze to taste as they should, and leave you free to do lots of unselfconscious grinning. It’s less handy when it comes to pudding, which doesn’t tend to benefit from the heavy-handed addition of salt, but then again salt is only sodium chloride, not magic fairy pixie dust.

So burn your food-and-wine-matching bibles, all you need at your table is some salt, some citrus and an open mind. Drink what makes you happy, eat what makes you happy, be happy. Nothing could be simpler.

There are books and websites entirely devoted to food and wine matching. People spend a lot of time on it. Not me. I think that, confused by the amount that people they consider more knowledgeable than themselves bang on about it, many wine drinkers find the subject enormously offputting, and that some of them are put off wine, or at least the full appreciation of it, as a result. A few very basic rules are all you need, and everything else will look after itself. Rule No1, and most important by a margin: Drink the wine you like, with the food you like.

But that’s not to say that perfection doesn’t exist – just that there are many practical issues that make it unlikely that you’ll get there very often. For a start, you don’t know precisely how a dish will taste until you’ve cooked it, or how a wine will taste until you’ve opened it. And by then, if the match isn’t quite right, you’ve still got an open bottle of wine and a plate of food. You’re not really going to throw either of them out, are you? But if it’s the wine you want to drink, you’ll probably have a good time anyway – even if it goes so very badly with the food that you leave it until after your meal to actually drink it. If you only opened it because of something you read on matchfoodandwinelikeapro.com, you’ll only have to go back to the wine rack for something you want to drink.

All of which is a long-winded way of leading up to this revelation: last Sunday, Mother’s Day, I cooked my mum blueberry pancakes and served them for brunch with Innocent Bystander’s delicious, delicate, berry-blessed and just 5.5% pink moscato, and it made me very popular indeed. I’m not always convinced by the pairing of very sweet food with very sweet wine, but this put not-overly-sweet food together with not-entirely-cloying wine, and it was very jolly indeed. The wine is widely available, for around £6-£6.50, so if you’re cooking anything berryish, try it. If you fancy. Or don’t. Obviously.

I’ll have more about food and wine matching, incidentally, very soon (when I finally get round to pressing the publish button on the world’s all-time most overdue blogpost).

After nearly 45 minutes spent in the genial company of Bruno Colomer Marti, head winemaker at Codorniu, I ask him about the situation in Spain and his eyes turn downwards. “You know that in Spain we have a big problem with politicians,” he says (he actually says “politic men” rather than “politicians”, his English being just 90% perfect). “We have 25% of people without work – 50% for young people. They start to work at 30. It’s terrible. And now we have the crisis. For us, it’s OK. The number of bottles [we sell] is more or less the same, but with low quality. They spend less money. But we are very happy that we are the most important Cava house, with the biggest market share. We are sure that when the crisis disappears, that will be perfect for us. For us, now is a difficult time. We are not happy.”

Even before Spain was engulfed in financial crisis, Cava exports were expanding faster than a glutton’s waistline. In 1982 they packed off 18 million bottles; in 1989 48 million; in 1996 nearly 61 million; in 2002 108 million; and by 2007, when the financial crisis hit, the best part of 127 million. In percentage terms, in the last 30 years exports have increased from 18% of production to 60%. But with Spanish sales slumping producers need global thirst for their bubbles to boom still further, which means that us British Cava-drinkers are getting a fair bit of extra attention.

By volume Codorniu is the third biggest sparkling wine producer in the UK market (Freixenet, who with Codorniu produce about 90% of all Cava, and Martini Asti, since you ask), but even their popularity here comes with a downside. Brits like Codorniu, and Cava in general, because it’s reliable, fizzy and cheap. Try to sell expensive Cava, though, and we go off it pretty rapidly. Which is why Reina Maria Cristina, the best of their widely available wines, a 100% pinot noir white sparkler produced only in good vintages, is discounted here to £10 a bottle, when a Spaniard would expect to pay about £15 (and that even though £2.91 of our bottle price is either duty or VAT on that duty, and the Spanish get theirs all-but tax-free) . It has also led the marketeers to develop special baby blue and bubblegum pink bottle wraps just for us, the better to catch the consumer’s eye or, as the company’s PR representative puts it, “premiumise”.

Given the amount they can charge for it, the effort of putting bubbles into the wine scarcely seems worth it. It’s just a very expensive and laborious way of making their grape juice less valuable. It seems they’ve worked this out too, having just launched their first still wines into the UK market (well, their first since Jose Raventos brought bubbles back from Champagne in 1872). The wines, an albarino-chardonnay white and a cabernet sauvignon-tempranillo red (made by the Australian Mark Nairn, while Colomer Marti concentrates on the Cava) are both decidedly decent, food-friendly quaffers destined to be discounted down to £6.99, and available from Ocado.

For a company that has been in the hands of the same family since 1551 – “I was in New York last week,” Colomer Marti says at one point. “When we started making wine, New York didn’t even exist!” – Codorniu are surprisingly keen on growth and innovation. “We want to bring more consumers into the Codorniu brand,” the PR person tells me. “We have a very loyal following, and Spanish wines are doing phenomenally well at the moment, but there aren’t many brands in the Spanish wine market. It’s our idea to bring something new. We know people like the reassurance of brands. We’ve done a lot of consumer research, asking whether people accept the Cordoniu brand for still wine as well as sparkling, and people think they’ve bought it already. They’ve seen the label, they think it’s familiar.”

It’s hard to be genuinely happy about a situation that has been brought about by the combination of one country’s economic armageddon and another’s collective refusal to spend appropriate sums for decent wine, but that’s where we are. The upshot is that in the British market, all of Codorniu’s Cavas except perhaps the basic Brut are cheaper than they should be, some by quite a way. The Seleccion Raventos, currently £7.49 at Majestic, and the Reina Maria Cristina, which is £60 for six at Tesco, are the ones to go for. Codorniu’s wines may be losing their fizz but at prices like that their sales figures shouldn’t.

Some good and some bad in the last winey week, the good news being that even the bad was good. This may be confusing, I know. I’ll come back to that.

We’ll start with the good, though, and a terrifically successful few hours spent focusing on the produce of the Valle d’Aosta, an obscure corner of Italy which is home to some even more obscure grapes, including Petit Rouge, Vien de Nus, Fumin and Petite Arvine. It’s perhaps a shame, then, that my favourite wine was made from probably the least obscure white grape of them all, but them’s the breaks.

They don’t make a lot of wine in the Valle d’Aosta. It’s a bit hard to find out precisely how much, as the only English-language statistics I can find give the region’s annual production of grapes in quintals, which is a bit like them giving the price of something in florins. But for what it’s worth they produced 24,000 quintals in 2008, making it the smallest wine region in Italy by a very long way (about a fifth of titchy Liguria, and a 20th of poky Molise) and putting its  production at 0.22% of the largest, Veneto, home to all those oceans of Pinot Grigio.

On further investigation it seems that in 2011 the Valle d’Aosta produced 13,000 hectolitres of red wine, enough to fill 1.7 million bottles, and a little over half as much white. That’s not a lot of wine, not really. The entire region produces as much wine as Dom Perignon, or the American zinfandel specialists Ravenswood. My first experience of Aostan wine came when I happened upon a bottle of fabulous Fumin at Les Caves de Pyrene, and I’ve since bought every wine from the region I’ve seen. Both of them. Those selfish Italians drink most of the little wine they make, leaving but a tiny trickle for us over here.

There are excellent reds, and some delicious sweet wines (my favourite, a moscato passito from La Crotta di Vegneron, isn’t available outside Italy) but the whites we tried were all bright, clear, and full of the somewhat hard-to-define quality winefolk call minerality. I particularly loved Les Cretes’ unoaked chardonnay, as bright and joyful an expression of this often overlaboured grape I’ve had in a good while. The best price I can find it for in the UK is £17.08, when bought by the case from Winebear, which is quite a lot for such an unpretentious wine, but it seems to cost around £9 locally, making it as good a reason as any to drive to Italy. If I had a big party to organise this year I’d be hiring a van and booking a ferry right now. The same producer’s Fumin is also excellent, and definitely worth sticking in the boot, given that you’re driving through.

Now, the less good. One of the problems of being constantly and quite successfully in the search of wine bargains is that you can forget, or not even realise in the first place, the value of some of the stuff you own. And so it was that on Monday I poked around the wine fridge for a simple wine to share with Mrs CF over dinner and produced something procured from I don’t know where for I don’t know how much that looked suitable. In a flash the cork was out, glasses produced and … as soon as I poured it I knew something was up. It was so much darker, fuller, deeper than I expected. And then, the smell. And the taste. This boy was smooth, the kind of smooth that requires several more than the traditional two O’s to express. It was smoooooooth. It was a wine to dive into and submerse yourself in. One so alluring, so totally lacking in nasty corners or poky thorns that might put off even the very occasional wine-drinker, that it would be certain to impress a tableful of important guests. And so to wine-searcher, where I found that it costs £39.99. That makes it perhaps the most expensive wine I own, or very close, and totally inappropriate for a Monday evening a deux. It was my only bottle. It’s gone. It was good. I want more. I won’t get it. Bah.

January is an expensive time to like wine. The new year brings sales, each more tempting than the last, plus a new vintage of en-primeur Burgundy, if that’s your thing, and the usual steady stream of merchants’ offers.

I have resisted reasonably well, even though there have certainly been some bargains to be had. One, though, caught my attention: The Wine Society’s “chocolate indulgence case”, presumably intended as a Christmas present but reduced in January from £40 to £12.95, and then again to £9.95. There’s only one bottle of wine inside, a sweet red made from the tannat grape which normally costs £12.95 on its own. So what they were essentially offering, by the end, was not just a discount on the wine, but a load of free chocolate and free delivery as a (literal) sweetener for the effort of opening your front door and taking it off their hands.

I bought four. I thought it would be a good thing to take to friends’ houses if they invite us round to dinner, or a birthday present, or a Valentine’s treat for Mrs CF. What I didn’t think, though, was that the box would be so ruddy enormous. It’s only 50cl of wine and a bit of chocolate, after all. So much for keeping them a secret til February 14 – they’re currently taking up most of the living room. It seems that when I decided it looked like an enormous bargain, I still didn’t realise quite how big my bargain would be.