KNOW YOUR GRAPES
The real key to understanding how a wine will taste and how it will behave with food is to know something about the grape variety and where the wine is from.

Generally an old world wine will come across as slightly “drier” than a new world wine i.e. a French Chardonnay may have ripe apple flavours at best whereas an Australian Chardonnay will have more ripe fruit and will have more tropical flavours like melon, pineapple and kiwi.

However, many old world wines prove to be better food wines – the lack of very ripe fruit can be a plus, as quite often too much fruit gets in the way of food flavours.