Food and wine pairing

Okay so I had this idea to start a blog chronicling my wine and food experiences. I decided to do this for several reasons: 1, to have some sort of reference able record of which foods I had with which wines and how they ended up faring and 2, to make this record public so i could share my experiences. I know that there are plenty of magazines where you could read about Smug Old Man A and Smug Old Man B sitting around a table in Tuscany sharing some crazy wine that you and I could never dream of tasting at a restaurant where neither you nor I could afford to dine, but my purpose here is not to gloat or brag, all I want to do is record my experiences and I feel that if I utilize a public forum, such as a blog, it will force me into really focusing on the mixing of food and wine, enough to forge a complete opinion instead of just jotting down half assed scribbles in a stupor and pretending that counts as tasting notes.
So this is going to be my first entry in the Book of Taste. I won't really start out with any kind of motto or statement, I think I will just jump into it and that is that for an introduction.

Thanksgiving
The days leading up to Thanksgiving were really hectic at work with more people than you can imagine coming up to me asking what they should drink with their holiday meal. I got into the habit of asking people what they were having to eat because after a couple days of assuming that everyone eats what I eat at Thanksgiving, I found out that the only meal component you can count on showing up at was the turkey. What ended up happening to me was in effect a pre-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving burn out. As the only member of my family that works in wine, and as a result, really knows much about it, it is usually my role to pick out or bring the wine that we will have at any BYO family event. After considering the meal that I know as Thanksgiving, and, after hearing so many variations on that theme I decided that i was done playing sommelier. Instead of focusing on matching every minute quality of every dish with any wine I could imagine I decided that the perfect wine for me to drink on this one night devoted to being thankful was pretty much any wine I felt like drinking. Two or three days of working retail wine sales will do that to you, maybe call it apathy or whatever, all I wanted to do was drink something I knew I would enjoy. i grabbed one of my all time favorites, "La Bastide", a Minervois made by Chateau Coupe Roses. At about $11 this is their base level wine which is a blend of grenache, syrah, and of course, carignan. I picked the wine not based on its appeal of compatibility but rather because I figured it would be just about the right body type and regardless of the food, I knew I would enjoy it. Just as I thought, the wine was spot on: cool ranch dorito aromas and bitter black olive flavors were perfectly typical but really did not create the best combination when drunk with pretty much any of the food. This really wasn't such a shame, however. The food, much of it sweet and loaded with butter, was a far cry from the food of Southern France, so i figured we just had a terrible case of geographical mismatch. Oh well, another year...another Thanksgiving to put behind us.
mark!