If you choose to live by strict rules when it comes to pairing wine with food, there are few things that you need to get straight. First, it’s important to realize that general rules don’t make any sense in the complicated business of food-and-wine matching--especially because all of the "rules" you've heard were formulated 150 years ago, when wine was incredibly different. Also,the "rules" developed, for the most part, around very high-caliber wines, and were meant to "protect" those wines from the wrong foods.

Here are three foods that have a particularly bad rap. I’m here to tell you why you can still enjoy them with wine and not endure public humiliation!

Salad
The reason we're supposed to keep our leafy greens from our grapy drinks is in the dressing: the acid of a vinaigrette will most definitely change the perceived character of a wine. Something acidic makes wine taste sweeter--and if you're drinking a great wine, balanced on the head of a pin, why would you want to alter your perception of it? You are paying, in part, to apprehend a great wine's exquisite harmony. If the wine is thin and acid to begin with, with no fancy "balance" that you wish to preserve, the miracle is that an acidic dressing will make your wine taste sweeter, richer, fuller, fruitier, better!
As for salad, I love it with an unimpressive Beaujolais--exactly what you'll find at bistro after bistro in the Beaujolais region.

Artichokes
Similar issues attend the subject of wine with artichokes: anything you taste, be it wine, water or bagels, will taste sweeter after you've tasted an artichoke. The reason here is not acid in the food, but a natural substance called cynarin. So, if you grab a wine that is so determinedly dry it's unappealing to most people, and serve it with an artichoke gratin, you have probably improved the pleasure-giving ability of that wine. In the US, one of my favorite matches with artichokes is Provencal rose. This wine can taste delightfully fruity in the south of France, but when it gets sent here much of the fruit seems to dissipate over the ocean, and the wines can become austere. Artichokes, garlic, tomatoes, herbs, olive oil--and newly un-austere Provencal Rose.

Soup
Soup and wine present a different issue: texture. The classic thinking is that wine (a thin liquid) with soup (a thin liquid) is texturally redundant. But, to my mind, this would only be a problem if you're sipping consomme and even then there are ways around it (like serving a richer, fortified wine with the thin soup, or serving something bubbly, like Champagne, with it.) But the field's much more open than that, these days--because hardly anyone serves consomme anymore! Lots of rich soups, crammed with goodies, have come into our lives from other ethnic traditions and creative chefs are constantly coming up with new soups, in which, for example, a main course portion of grilled halibut may "swim" in a broth. Don't be scared by the broth! Just take a good look at what's in the broth, and go about wine-matching as if this thing was not a soup at all. If I'm eating a Vietnamese pho, and feel like a glass of wine, I'm thinking about what to drink with boiled beef, noodles and herbs.

There are foods that I do find difficult to match with wine, but, ironically, they are sometimes the ones that the "rules" treat as easy matches. Wine with cheese? A nightmare! But that's another subject. For now, please don't let anyone cow you into thinking that certain foods are off-limits to wine. The realm of delicious matches is only limited by your imagination.

-David Rosengarten