A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine. So says Brillat-Savarin and Brian St. Pierre, longtime contributing editor for Decanter magazine and author of A Perfect Glass of Wine (ISBN 0811812952) agrees. For those of us who enjoy wine, but are just beginning to develop our interest in its relationship with food, behold, The Perfect Match! While other books (like our own Wine Lover's Cookbook, 0-8118-2071-8) cover this subject, The Perfect Match approaches matching from the opposite direction. Find the foods or flavours you want to eat and then find the perfect wine to go with it. Topics of discussion include the reasons why wine is so appealing in the first place, how the combination of food and wine has evolved over time in various regions of the world, and the basic rules of matching. Numerous sidebars will offer information on what foods are difficult to match, how special occasions determine wine choices, and the big cheese question - red, white, dry, or sweet? Wines are listed by grape varieties or type with descriptions of their principal flavours, their virtues as companions with food, and the foods they go best with. The book includes classic and contemporary recipes influenced by the great wine-producing countries of Spain, Italy, and France. They have been chosen because of how well each one goes with wine and serve as a base to identify basic flavours in the food and their most complementary wine types. Two indexes make it handy to look up either recipes or wines.