Thirty or so years ago we were dining at the Boonville Hotel and seated across the room was a local rancher cuddled up to his young sweetie. We overheard him order two blood-rare steaks and a bottle of Navarro Cluster Select Riesling. After a moment's hesitation, the baffled waiter asked if he wanted the small (375 ml) bottle. “Bring us the big bottle” the rancher responded, “I like my wine sweet, just like my girlfriend.” The couple loved the pairing and polished off both steaks and the bottle; we should have gone over and thanked him for ordering our wine, but we somehow felt uncomfortable congratulating him on his choice of sweet wine with steak. What fools we were! Why was the rancher's choice so different than drinking Sauternes with Foie Gras? Which wines are supposed to complement which foods totally changes with history and culture. The Romans, for example, drank predominately sweet wines with meat dishes, the sweeter and older, the more the wines were prized. Pliny wrote about a wine from 121 BC, so famous a vintage of classical antiquity, that it was given the name of the Consul Optimus: “The wine now has lasted for 200 years... but has assumed the thickness of honey as is the way with very old wines.”

---