Of all the myths that surround wine, none is more pernicious than the received rubric that stipulates white wine with fish and red with meat. This ubiquitous but unthinking bit of dogma has led, in my recent experience, to the oddity of being served red wine at the start of a meal – because the first course was meat (duck salad) – followed by a white wine with the main course, because it was fish (sea bream).

Marrying food and wine perfectly is a rarely realised ideal and subjective taste, unhindered by convention, will rightly be the ultimate rule. Nevertheless, there is a general point to be made: the key to food and wine pairing is not colour but weight, strength and substance.

It obviously makes no sense to match delicate wines with sturdy, full-flavoured food: delicious as Vermentino is, it would disappear alongside venison, pork belly or even a burger. Conversely, imagine drinking a rich, deeply aromatic Gewürztraminer or, even worse, a beefy Valpolicella Amarone, with delicately poached white fish.