Good advice, Ray.

It also helps to balance the flavors of your meals. If your entree is lacking in salt or sour, the remaining flavors will tend to overload your tongue and your taste buds will become temporarily flooded or skewed. Meat has a savory flavor that your tongue treats almost as if it were sweet. So the meat will skew your taste buds so that the wine will taste bitter if you drink immediately after eating. Your taste buds will suppress the sweet flavors of the wine. Even as dry wine will be affected if it has any fruit flavors.

We learned this from a couple of the chefs from the Mondavi Institute when they gave a presentation to our class. They performed a little experiment on us. They cooked up some plain beef without seasoning of any kind. We all got bowls of salt and lemon wedges, as well as white and red wines. We tasted the wine and remembered the flavors. Then we ate a piece of meat and immediately tasted the wine again. Suddenly it tastes different. less fruit, more bitter. Then we added some salt and lemon juice to the meat and repeated the tastings. Drink - Eat - Drink again. The wine's flavor didn't not change. We repeated this with fish and asparagus too.

We also learned that your taste buds will usually return to normal sensitivity after about 30 seconds.

Once I learned this I started paying attention to the seasonings I used and how they affected the taste of the wine. More than once I remember pairing up the right wine with the right meal and wondering why the wine had gone bad. I don't want to think about how many glasses of wine I may have missed enjoying.