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.
