Book reveiw:”Harmonize Wine and Food” by Jacques Orhon

Jacques Orhon is a sommelier for over 20 years. It is also a columnist on Canadian television. His book on matching food and wine is here in its 3rd edition, revised and re-updated.

His approach is to create groupings based on similarities of ingredients, formulations and colors. For each of these families of dishes, Jacques Orhon goes after a short narrative advise us 10-20 wines, sorted by price. It goes even further by reproducing the labels 6 producers especially recommended that constitute what he calls his “first choice”. It has selected 500 wines out. The book ends with the presentation of 50 recipes concocted by chefs for a specific wine, it has adequate preparations tasty and easy to achieve.


The print quality is particularly good. A double index, per dish and wine, allowing the reader direct access to the interior of the book. The index, however, wine is cumbersome to use: it could be more detailed. The index is flat wrong place and would receive a breakdown by major type of food. In my view, the weak point of this work.

However, these are small defects that do not detract from the qualities of this book. As the title suggests we, Jacques Orhon puts forward the concept of harmony between wine and a dish, a dish that does not need to be artificially original and complicated to be tasty. With this book, he manages to make us fully share this approach.