Here are a few ideas to enhance your food and wine pleasure:

1. Work through a meal from lighter, drier wines to heavier, sweeter ones.

2. The stronger and more diverse the flavors in a dish, the more they’ll fight with a powerful or complex wine, so pick something simple.

3. Many wine matches have evolved over the course of decades, even centuries. So if you’re cooking a dish from a particular region, try it with the local wine.

4. Wines that seem acidic by themselves often work very well with food. And conversely, easy-drinking standalone wines can seem flabby at the table

5. If any combinations really don’t work, just have a piece of bread and a swig of water and move on.

More Tips
Here are a few more tips to help you get more enjoyment out of a meal. As with all food and wine rules, they’re there to be broken.

You could drink a different food and wine combination every day of your life and only scratch the surface of possibilities. Disastrous permutations are few, but with a little thought, you’ll be able to discover some marriages made in heaven.

As in any good partnership, food and wine should complement each other, rather than be at war. These are not hard-and-fast rules, more pointers to help you get more pleasure out of a meal.

Fact
Add a splash of the wine you’re going to drink to the cooking, and the marriage will be enhanced.