Each Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine with one great meal and publishes the results along with the recipe in a little feature it likes to call ‘Blow the Bank’ — except when it doesn’t. Like, when it didn’t last week and when it won’t this week.

That means, you’ll have to wait until next Friday for the conclusion to Wednesday’s Whine & Cheese, when an ‘aspiring’ journalist at a recent event asked InterWined for a good wine recommendation, before questioning the extent of the copyright that protects InterWined.com’s content for plagiarists.

Instead, this Friday, InterWined brings you ‘Not So Impossible Food & Wine Pairing #1: Chips & Salsa’, a tip of the hat to Dr. Vino and his “Impossible Food Wine Pairings”.

In July 2007 Dr. Vino asked his readers to recommend a wine to serve alongside snack food staple and wine-pairing stumper Chips & Salsa; and at a tasting event yesterday evening, InterWined finally discovered the answer.

At first thought, chips — or crisps as they’re generally referred to in the UK — might sound like a deceptively simple dish to match with wine. And deceptive it is. What’s so impossible about finding a match? Three words: salt and tomato.

Readers that remember the first edition of ‘Blow the Bank’ will recall that I briefly outlined InterWined’s golden rule for food & wine pairing: taste.

Taste is essential. Taste is the Yenta of food and wine pairings (Yenta being the matchmaker from Fiddler on the Roof, of course!). It’s what marries classic combinations such as Sauternes and Foie Gras or Champagne and Oysters, and sees them through the ages, from their initial rise to fame straight through to their golden years without ever having to worry about rehab or divorce. Taste could no doubt teach some of today’s younger celebrity couples a thing or two.

And just as the song from the musical suggests, it’s taste, both in terms of personal preference and the tongue, that creates the necessary balance between the characteristics of the food and the characteristics of the wine that helps make for a “perfect match”. But sometimes foods are like little Chava; they don’t want just any match — unless it’s a “matchless match”.

So what’s that got to do with salt, tomato, and chilli ? Well, they’re Chavas and prove hard work for our sweet old Taste-Yenta. (Right now, you’re saying to yourself, this Fiddler thing’s getting a bit carried away…but stay with me. There’s a point to be made.)

For wine to find a balance with salt, it has to rely on a touch of sweetness. Not too much sweetness, not dessert wine sweetness, but subtle sweetness, just enough to take the edge off of the salt. Taste makes it the classic case of opposites attract.

That’s simple enough, and there are plenty of wines that handle salty pretty well.

But, now add tomato. Tomato is a fruit that we treat like a vegetable. Depending on the way it’s prepared, it takes on different characteristics and changes slightly in flavour, which is how some people (people like me) can distinctly dislike raw and stewed tomatoes, but still enjoy ketchup and other tomato sauces. Tomatoes generally taste tangy and acidic in salsa, thanks to squeezes of lemon juice and cracks of black pepper. Foods high in acidity like acidic wines to balance them. So, in this instance, taste dictates like for like.

Start to see the impossibility?

And, if you throw in a bit of chilli to your salsa, you just might think all is lost. Because, like all spicy flavours, chilli likes a bit of spice. It is a hothead, after all. But, sometimes — to make matters more complicated — it likes a bit of sweet. It could go either way.

See; It’s all so complicated.…except last night, it wasn’t it.

Last night, it was straightforward. Mundane even. You see, last night, taste found the matchless match thanks to one Pink Elephant, two winemakers (José Nieva and David Baverstock), four grapes, and 12 UK wine experts looking for the perfect wine for spicy foods.

What does that mean? It means that a panel of 12 wine experts helped identify each of the characteristics and four grapes (Touriga Nacional, Alfrocheiro, Castelão, and Cabernet Sauvignon) required to produce the 2006 Pink Elephant Portuguese Rosé (£5 from Tesco and Morrisons).

And, while InterWined doesn’t yet know if it’s the perfect match for spicy foods, it knows that it is the absolute matchless match to Chips & Salsa, and among the only successful examples of wine by committee. Looking quite a bit like Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry Juice on first pour is a fair description of colour, but an insult to the quality of the wine. This isn’t juice. Sure, there’s raspberry on the nose, but the flavour is more tannic and peppery, with a just of little hint of petrol aftertaste. This is a decent Rosé, make no mistake. But, it’s not until the wine (served extremely chilled) is paired, that it becomes something more substantial and worthy of real praise.

For £5, you would be hard pressed to find a better wine to serve with a bowl of Chips & salsa or Sweet Chilli Kettle Crisps (it’s a very good match for that too), when entertaining guests or slumped on the couch in front of the telly. That probably wasn’t what the Bill Rolfe and Toby Hancock from 10 International, the wine company responsible for Pink Elephant, had in mind when they decided to find a wine to pair with spicy food. (In fact, they were specifically thinking curries.) But, the two of them should be proud, regardless. Finding a matchless match to an impossible pairing is no mean feat. On it’s own: 8.2; with Chips & Salsa: peerless.

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