When, long ago, I wrote for The Sunday Times, I used to say I wanted to be the “good times” correspondent. My argument was that although the paper’s writers tended to have specialities – wine, food and travel among them – readers often experience these pleasures of life together, so wouldn’t it be an idea to have someone writing about all three in one glorious amalgam?
I certainly love all three, and am sad that there isn’t more blurring of the disciplines. Traditionally, wine experts rarely stray into the territory of solid matter, many of them viewing it as a distraction rather than a healthy complement. And in my experience many authorities on food, and even chefs, can find wine dauntingly complicated.
This has been changing, though I wonder whether the evolution is headed in a direction that is truly helpful to the consumer. Chefs in France always seemed less intimidated by wine than most of their counterparts elsewhere – for obvious reasons perhaps – with the Troisgros family in Roanne being particularly respected for their connoisseurship. But it was Alain Senderens, chef-proprietor of the three-star L’Archestrate and then Lucas Carton in Paris, who first used wine to inspire his dishes, most famously a duck cooked in the Roman style of Apicius with Banyuls, Roussillon’s riposte to port.