Probably as intimidating to many people as the smelling and tasting ritual is the question of how to match a wine with food, or vice versa. Like everything else to do with wine it ultimately boils down to personal taste and personal experience but also has some underlying principles worth knowing about.

Learning from scratch how your favorite wine interacts on your palate with your favorite foods will increase your appreciation for both the wine and the food. Along the way you’ll probably discover the few combinations that really are best avoided and a few others that can make your taste buds sing.

There really are no hard and fast rules to pairing food and wine, despite what some connoisseurs might say. Instead, think of any advice you are given as merely guidelines that will help make the voyage of discovering your favorite food and wine combinations quicker and easier.

These guidelines are constantly in flux. Cuisine trends change and so too do wine-making trends. The old adage of white wine with fish and red wine with red meat is somewhat irrelevant these days. It all depends on the style of a particular wine, how the meat or fish is prepared, and how the accompanying sauces and sides are made.

One important guideline for pairing food and wine is based on sensory adaptation. An acidic wine will taste less acidic if paired with a fairly acidic food. Vinaigrette dressing on a salad, for example, will mellow out a wine that would otherwise taste too tart. Similarly, a sweet wine will taste less sweet if drunk with a dessert, which is why dessert wines taste far too sweet if drunk on their own.

Some food and wine interactions are more confusing. Saltiness of food has a profound effect on how a wine tastes, for example. A salty dish will give the impression of neutralizing some of the acidity of a particularly tart wine, making it taste smoother and fruiter. Foods with some inherent bitterness, such as green vegetable, can actually enhance the bitterness of some wines.

Perhaps one of the classic pairings is a bold red wine with steak, and for good reason. The concentrated protein in red meat serves to soften the taste of tannins in wine, taming what might normally be an astringent, tannic monster into a softer and fruiter beast altogether. A barrel aged Napa cabernet, for example, will be perfectly balanced with a steak but taste like a hunk of wood if you still have some left over when the crème brulee arrives. The sugar in the dessert overpowers the fruit in the wine, leaving just those woody tannins to dominate.

For a thoroughly educational experience, try drinking just one wine, white or red, with a multiple-course meal to see how its taste dramatically changes with each course. It might not be fun for some courses but the basics of food and wine interaction very quickly become evident.

Some of the simplest foods can prove to be the hardest to find a good wine match. Cheese, for example, does not (as many people believe) go terribly well with many red wines. Try port for rich cheeses like Stilton or a dry white wine like sauvignon blanc for sharper cheeses like goat cheese.