Harmony on the Palate: Matching Simple Recipes to Everyday Wine Styles

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

Within the last generation, as wine has become a matter of mass
marketing and interest in the lives of youngish middle-class North
American consumers, specialized volumes on the art of matching food and
wine have begun rolling off the presses. Some are too precious for
words, offering us the gospel, breathless and verbatim, in printed
interviews with guru winemakers, celebrity chefs, sundry
sommeliers—even the authors with each other. Others are works of art,
offering the challenge of splendid seasonal menus accompanied by
reasoned, concise treatises on the appropriate wines and spirits.

Harmony on the Palate falls between the ridiculous and sublime. It is a
practical guide, based on an ordering of sensory principles into
building blocks: sourness, sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, fattiness,
hot and spicy, and fruitiness. Darling groups wines into 13 categories,
from dry sparkling and crisp, dry whites through to sweet ports, and
assesses each category with respect to its measure of sourness,
fruitiness, sweetness, fattiness, and bitterness. Each type is afforded
a chapter, and the chapter contains simple (but often exciting) recipes
that guarantee success in matching and offer models for the readers’
own creations. For food and wine people, from those who have mastered
just the bare rudiments of cooking to advanced intermediates, this is by
far the best primer.