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The new TV season is here. NFL football is into week four. Hockey's hitting the ice. From a culinary standpoint, it means one thing: If you're cooking, you're not watching. And vice versa.

I'll wager that the main seasonal fare in most Canadian homes right about now is fast food, lip service to fresh harvest produce notwithstanding.

Yet a perfectly defensible diet of take-out chicken, frozen entrees and delivery pizza need not turn evenings at home into a scene from Roseanne or Married with Children. Add a civilized bottle of wine and some stemware, and you can rescue any dinner from the white-trash bin of shame.

The challenge for most North Americans is getting beyond the hardwired association between assembly-line food and industrial soda or beer. For years I've kept a log of offbeat wine pairings, things like chardonnay with popcorn, port with Timbits and baco noir with Buffalo wings. I think of it as my "TV guide to food and wine."

But even my scribbles pale in comparison to the encyclopedic knowledge of Mike Pierce, owner and general manager of Maverick American Eatery & Wine Bar in San Francisco.

"I can find a wine to go with anything," says Mr. Pierce, a certified sommelier who, at his restaurant, conducts junk-food wine-pairing seminars featuring such ingredients as Slim Jim beef jerky and Skittles.

Thanks to the "regional American" theme of his restaurant, he also carries deep knowledge about main courses people tend to eat in front of the screen. Things such as fried chicken, pizza, ribs and wings.

"People are always apprehensive about drinking wine with fried chicken," he says. His match: pinot gris, also called pinot grigio.

Mr. Pierce says any style, whether the richer versions from France or the leaner ones from Italy, will work. The fruitiness complements the spice in the batter, and the firm acidity will cut through the fat.

The faint bitterness in the pinot gris tends to harmonize with what he describes as an elusive chicken flavour. "I don't want to say chemical, but there is definitely a certain distinct flavour that the meat itself has that is not the easiest thing to pair with."

Prefer red with chicken? Mr. Pierce, whose suggestions are sometimes specific enough to earn him the reputation as a wine geek, recommends a Russian River pinot noir. An area of California north of San Francisco, the Russian River Valley is known for intensely jammy pinots with soft tannins, good acidity and hints of spices often found in fried-chicken batter.

However, for KFC chicken, whose secret "11 herbs and spices" Mr. Pierce believes contain a high peppercorn content, you might want to try something in a more jammy, spicy vein, but still with a punch of acidity. My favourite pick: red California zinfandel.

There is no repast more frequently served on coffee tables in front of the tube, I'll venture, than pizza, especially the classic North American favourite, pepperoni. At Mr. Pierce's urging, I savoured one with a barbera during Gossip Girl while killing time before Mad Men, and consider it my new pizza favourite. Though hardly known here, barbera is Italy's great workhorse grape, grown all over the country, but most successfully in the northwestern Piedmont districts of Alba and Asti. Usually between $12 and $18, and almost always distinguished by a tight acid grip, it's considered a classic match for cured-meat platters. That helps to explain its harmony here. The acidity also helps it stand up to the tricky tomato sauce.

Mr. Pierce, who visited Canada often as a young hockey player, used the occasion of our telephone conversation to propose a pairing for that decidedly un-Italian pizza-topping combination so inexplicably popular in this country - the ham-and-pineapple "Hawaiian." The pick: dry riesling. The reason: plenty of fruit and acid to match the problematic pineapple. Coincidentally, Hawaiian pizza is widely thought to have been invented in Germany, riesling's spiritual homeland.

Riesling, often imbued with lime-like acidity and what Mr. Pierce calls an "agave earthiness," is sort of the wine equivalent of a margarita, which also makes for a good pairing for tacos and nachos.

Football cuisine's crowning glory may be the deep-fried chicken wing, most notably the hot-sauce-slathered variant named after its birthplace, Buffalo. My own preference is Ontario baco noir, a full-bodied red. Mr. Pierce swears by brut rosé, a dry, pink, sparkling wine, in particular one from Michigan producer L Mawby Vineyards. He likes its combination of richness and acidity, qualities I find in abundance in the red baco noir.

Another decent choice is Australian shiraz, re-affirmed by yours truly during Sunday's Buffalo Bills victory over Oakland as I tucked into an impressively spicy Hungry-Man Sports Grill Buffalo Style Chicken Strips frozen TV dinner ("Over 1 lb. of food"). Besides, I think, and Mr. Pierce agrees, that his choice could be a hard sell with some of the fall TV audience. "It might be a stretch for people to sit down and drink rosé watching football."

It has now passed into the annals of classic pairings that sparkling wine, the white kind, is the best wine match for plain potato chips. No doubt the pairing works. But it's by no means the only good match. Plain chips such as Lays are pretty friendly to most crisp white wines, actually. They also can work with full-bodied red wines. "The saltier your snack is, the better it will work with big red wines," says David Frakes, executive chef at Beringer Vineyards in Napa Valley. "You may be surprised as to how well salted potato chips work with red wine."

For the decidedly potato-like flavour of Pringles, on the other hand, Mr. Pierce is adamant about one of his greatest discoveries: albarino, a super-crisp white from Spain typically paired with seafood. "The albarino was stunning with the potato chips," he says. "It cleaned them up and matched the potato flavour."

He says wines such as albarino, barbera and riesling are typical of the best fast-food pairings in that they're little known to most North Americans, who tend to favour a small number of globally popular varietals such as chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. "For a lot of these you've got to go outside the box and try something you wouldn't normally be exposed to," he says.

Though riesling is a good "default" choice for many junk-food favourites, Mr. Pierce's top pick for the best wine to keep on hand for TV dining is one few people might consider: the dry rosé. Especially good, he says, is a fuller-bodied California style based on classic southern French grapes such as grenache, syrah or mourvedre. He first awoke to its remarkable versatility, especially with problematic processed foods containing additives such as monosodium glutamate, while trying to find a wine to go with Cool Ranch Doritos. A California brand called Sutton Cellars Rattlesnake Rosé was a "slam dunk," he says. "The yeasty character [of the wine] matched with the MSG ... It didn't leave a chemical taste."

But he's still searching for a wine that can tackle the traditional nacho cheese-flavoured Doritos. "Cheddar cheese is one of the hardest things to pair with wine. It's so lactic. Beer and port is better."

SPOT THE PAIRING

MATCH THE WINE TO THE MEAL

Which would you put together? Chardonnay and Cool Ranch? Pinot gris and popcorn? Wines, from top to bottom: chardonnay, dry pink bubbly,

riesling, pinot gris, dry rosé, barbera. Answers on page 6

Chardonnay and Cool Ranch Doritos?

Dry pink bubbly and Hungry-Man Sport's Grill

Riesling and buttered popcorn

Pinot gris and Pizza

Dry California Rose and Tacos /Nachos

Barbera and Fried chicken

SPOT THE PAIRING: THE ANSWERS

Chardonnay and buttered popcorn

Dry pink bubbly and Hungry-Man Sport's Grill

Riesling and Tacos /Nachos

Pinot gris and Fried chicken

Dry California Rose and Cool Ranch Doritos

Barbera and Pizza

TV guide to pairing wine and junk food

Buffalo wings Dry pink bubbly

Thai take-out Gewurztraminer

Hot dogs Beaujolais

Beef jerky Lambrusco

Pringles (plain) Albarino

Snickers bar Madeira

Red Skittles Dry California rosé

Sources: Mike Pierce;

Beppi Crosariol