Famed for its scholarly brilliance, All Souls College, Oxford is also renowned for the stringency of its entrance exams, which include, according to legend, culinary as well as academic assessment. Shortlisted aspirants are invited for the “knife and fork test”, aka dinner in college, during which they are closely observed as to how they deploy their fork to eat peas, what they do with the stones in a cherry pie and whether they take a knife and fork to asparagus or eat it with their fingers. An even trickier test would be to choose a wine to pair with the said asparagus.

Matching wine with food is prone, of course, to vacuous dogma: white with fish, red with meat being the most prevalent. As Jancis Robinson argues in The 24-Hour Wine Expert, what matters is not colour but “weight” and the impact of the wine on the palate. A reasonable rule of thumb to follow is to ask oneself what sauce would accompany a dish. Regional dishes are invariably successfully paired with locally sourced varieties for a very good reason.