Wine matching menus

In a recent obituary of Alain Senderens, I credited the great innovator - a man always at least ten years ahead of the game - with the development of the wine matching menu. It was true that when he moved into the art nouveau splendor that is Lucas Carton in the mid 80s, his next big thing was to recommend individual wines by the glass alongside his "tasting" - dread word - menus.

It was said that he was shamed into an interest in wine quite far on into his career, and became obsessive in his interest, and this was the result.

As a wine-obsessed chef myself - our name is legion -I should revere his memory for this if nothing else, but it is his innovation as a chef, his taking Nouvelle Cuisine a giant step ahead with the introduction of vegetable essences as sauces, for the use of fruit and taking French cuisine to a much lighter, higher level that I believe he will ultimately be remembered.

Wine matching menus, I’m afraid, often leave me cold.

It is not that I don’t believe in matching food with wine. I am indeed didactic and old fashioned in my preferences. I prefer white wine with fish; you can take a cooled Pinot Noir with your salmon if you insist but then I rarely eat salmon now that wild fish is so hard to get and I don’t have much time for a Pinot Noir that benefits for being chilled. I obey rules such as the avoidance of oaked Chardonnay with shellfish (what do people think Chablis is for, after all?) and I tend to stick with the terroir of the wine to go with the terroir of the food - Sangiovese with my bistecca and a bit of Trimbach Riesling with my choucroute, that sort of thing. These are the platitudes that I relay in my FT column week after week, in case anyone is interested.

But menus, didactic and prescriptive, designed measure-for-measure, fill me with dread. The first problem is quantity. I have usually finished the thimbleful of excellent Friulano before my cuttlefish risotto has even appeared at the table. I am then left looking imploringly at some stony-faced sommelier in the hope he might relent and give me a proper glass of the stuff. I concede there are people who think four 100ml pours of wine are sufficient - ‘more than enough’, as the bossy puritans will have it, but not anything like enough for the likes of me. And if I want to drink a bottle-plus of wine with a good dinner - or lunch, when I really have my drinking boots on - that is my business, and I am not alone as most of the readers and certainly the sainted proprietors of this journal will agree.

And then we have the online wine retailers, who's selection often effects the restaurants tasting menus. Quite frankly, it's sponsored wines from online stores.

"If you want to get to know a wine and to love a wine, you want a bottle. You want to taste it when the cork is first pulled, you want to sip it as it reveals itself, glug it when it has opened out like a rose in bloom and sip it again as the petals begin to fall."

The next problem is who is choosing the wine. You guessed it, it’s our old Mend in the black jacket with the silly Chevalier du Tastevin tasting thing around his neck, with the mother-knows-best attitude and his disastrous enthusiasm for a new orange wine made in Slovenia, which he thinks the perfect accompaniment to the poulet aux morilles that you rather fancied lashing out on a rather interesting Chardonnay from the Jura with. The unworthy suspicion occurs that he has to get rid of this foolhardy acquisition somehow - for some reason people just aren’t buying the stuff despite his enthusiastic recommendation (“I think we’d be happier with the Beaujolais”) - and the tasting menu is the natural dumping ground for these misadventures.

And then there is the wine. If you like a wine, if you want to get to know a wine and to love a wine, you want a bottle. You want to taste it when the cork is first pulled, you want to sip it as it reveals itself, glug it when it has opened out like a rose in bloom and sip it again as the petals begin to fall. This may take an hour or two, not the 15 minutes during which your scallops and black pudding with six types of cauliflower are parading themselves at your table.

This is not to say that a good sommelier should not recommend a wine, although God knows it is difficult enough when we are going a la carte and I’m having the grouse, Mrs fancies the brill, Bill is having a pork chop and his wife is having something disgusting with kale and quinoa (not that she’ll be drinking much anyway). But when we are taking the menu and all enjoying the same thing a recommendation can be very helpful. And helpful is what sommeliers are supposed to be. Restaurants do not exist to please them, or indeed chefs in their prescriptive demands, but you and I as wTe place our fat arses down and prepare to eat, imbibe and convive.