On the relevance of food and wine pairing Some reflections practised at Les Bacchanales

Rules abound, doctrines succeed one another, certainties proliferate; yet after years spent cooking, serving and tasting thousands of bottles — and perhaps, even more tellingly, observing guests as closely as their plates — one comes, in time, to suspect that a great pairing owes less to exact science than to a form of discernment, in which culture, experience, intuition and a certain generosity of spirit matter at least as much as technique itself.

A successful pairing, after all, is never a mere fortunate juxtaposition. It should form a progression, a narrative, even a drama in its own right. It is built on the same logic as a menu: not as a sequence of demonstrations, but as flavour set in motion — rising, reaching its climax, and resolving.

Thus, after the amuse-bouche, we often begin with a starter built around vegetables. Not because it is lighter, but because it has the particular virtue of awakening the appetite without satisfying it, of opening the palate without saturating it. The mistake here — and a serious one — would be to pair it with an overly demonstrative wine, one defined by personality alone. What one should look for instead are wines whose discretion is only apparent: wines that seem, at first, to recede, before revealing their depth.

A Gros Plant du Pays Nantais sur lies from Raphaël Luneau, for instance, served with almonds and fresh peas, brings saline tension, an almost ascetic restraint, and a rare ability to extend the taste of the pods and toasted almond without ever masking them. Or an Alpine Jacquère from Vullien, with a Jerusalem artichoke millefeuille — for some wines seek not to seduce, but to prepare the way for pleasure.

Asparagus, in this respect, is a revealing test. Its difficulty is often discussed, as though it were somehow naturally at odds with wine. We have always believed, on the contrary, that the difficulty lies less in the asparagus itself than in the excessive urge to dominate it. When white asparagus with wild garlic meets a dry Muscat "Saint-Grégoire" from Schoenheitz — from the highest vineyard village in Alsace — or when green asparagus with citrus finds its echo in the same floral, spiced and subtly bitter notes, something singular happens: what first seemed surprising comes to feel inevitable — a true harmony of bitterness.

Then comes the moment when the palate, now awake, is ready for more substance. A more structured starter may call for a lighter red, a fuller white, sometimes even a wine whose personality seems, at first glance, almost too much. So a Moulin-à-Vent from Serge Desperrier, vinified in the Burgundian style, served with Escoffier's financière, or a simple Crozes-Hermitage from Domaine Breyton with a mushroom "oreiller mousseux" — these are not stylistic flourishes, but the pursuit of something deeper: a coherence of texture as much as of flavour.

Fish remains the terrain where a sommelier's work comes closest to a form of learned acrobatics. Predictable pairings are endless; true ones are far rarer. Why, after all, should fish demand a white wine? The question, asked so often, has begun to lose its meaning.

A pike biscuit with sorrel and a red-wine matelote is naturally completed by a Morgon Les Charmes from Marc Jambon. A dolphinfish with morels, plums and a dried porcini sabayon pairs beautifully with a Gamay from the Allier Valley by the young Jean Wambergue. A pike-perch fillet in pochouse sauce comes into its own alongside a Saint-Pourçain from Denis Barbara — one of the finest, and too often overlooked, names of that appellation. And, faced with a zander or an Arctic char, we sometimes enjoy discovering what a great dry Jurançonor Pacherenc can bring: tension, depth, and a clarity that only makes sense in hindsight.

Meat, too, resists established hierarchies. A structured Tavelsuch as La Reine des Bois from Domaine de la Mordorée can suit lamb more precisely than many a more obvious red; a characterful Beaujolais, a contemporary Cahors, or a mature white wine may, depending on the moment, produce that particular emotion that arises when taste breaks free of convention.

Sometimes — and these are often the finest moments of our craft — a pairing becomes something close to a gift. An old vintage, opened for no good economic reason; a generous, vinous Beaune from a small grower; a Gigondas Clairet from Domaine des Bosquets, made with the freedom that marks out true vignerons; or a sole served in goujons, which we once chose to pair, against all expectation, with a single-vineyard Blanc de Noirs Champagne from Péhu & Simonet. On paper, it might have looked reckless; in the glass and on the plate, it settled into place with the quiet certainty that marks the greatest pleasures.

This pursuit of precision would remain no more than an abstract exercise if it were not grounded in a deeper conviction: that wine is, first and foremost, men and women, landscapes and loyalties. We have never set out to build an encyclopaedic cellar. What we have tried to do, more modestly perhaps but more sincerely, is to bring together growers whose integrity we admire as much as their wines — vignerons who seek not to escape their terroir but to inhabit it more fully; who make wines that are honest, refined, sometimes austere in youth, but always sincere in what they express.
This same loyalty explains our fondness for neglected appellations, forgotten or misunderstood grape varieties, wines whose reputation has, at times, been damaged by decades of mass, careless production. What, after all, remains in our collective memory of Muscadet, beyond the rather sad recollection of our grandparents' bar counters — a soulless rotgut with nothing to say for itself? And yet anyone who has tasted a great Muscadet sur lie from a serious terroir knows how unfair that caricature is. The same goes for Jacquère, Cour-Cheverny Romorantin, Gros Plant, Clairette, Manseng, certain Loire Gamays... they continue to offer curious palates territories of feeling that even the great international varieties, admirable as they are, could never entirely exhaust.

Our guests, after all, do not come merely to have their existing tastes confirmed. For the length of a meal, they agree to entrust us with part of their curiosity — and that trust places a quiet demand on us. It allows us to suggest a dry Muscat with asparagus, a Gamay or a Jurançon with river fish, a Tavel with lamb, a white Beaujolais with scallops, a Saint-Pourçain with a poached fish dish — or to introduce grape varieties and appellations that fall outside the familiar geography of taste, somewhere between the eternal Syrah–Mourvèdre–Grenache triad and the seemingly endless dialogue between Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Here, teaching is never a lecture; it becomes a sensory experience, and pleasure is its only real proof.

Cheese, too, deserves to be freed from convention. Its richness, fat, salinity, and occasional fermented edge often call not for the expected reds, but for charactered whites or pairings that seem, at first, paradoxical. A dish built around Comté, for instance, currently finds in the saline dryness of a Manzanilla Sherry a sense of completion that, once tasted, feels as if it had always been obvious.
Dessert may be the last refuge of simple truths. Some pairings would be pointless to reinvent: a Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise with peach, verbena, rose or certain strawberries; a historic Jurançon from Domaine de Bellegarde with rhubarb and elderflower; a garnet-hued Maury from Clos des Vins d'Amour with chocolate — these belong to that precious category of happy certainties. But dessert is also where the most joyful liberties are taken: a sparkling Montlouis from Les Pierres Écrites with Menton lemon, a pear cider from Éric Bordelet with a black tea dessert, or an old Sauternes that, beyond the perfect pairing, offers a pleasure so evident it suddenly justifies every excess.

Perhaps this, in the end, is what a food and wine pairing really is: not the display of knowledge, but the practice of a culture of pleasure — an art in which erudition is worth only what joy it brings; in which boldness is permissible only once it has proven, after the fact, to have been inevitable all along; and in which the sommelier, far from being a technician of taste, remains what the great hosts of the past always were: an attentive orchestrator of others' happiness.