There’s a fascinating article in this week’s Economist (it appears to be free for non-subscribers but perhaps only for the current week) on the reason why most red wine traditionally doesn’t complement fish. It’s all to do with the iron content of wine and how iron reacts with fatty compounds in fish to produce genuinely vile flavour combinations — it’s all scientifically proven. (The iron-rich red wines tasted ok when they were chelated i.e. had the iron removed by addition of a chemical to make it inert.)
One thing this shows is the fascinating role of minerals in the taste of food and drink. The amount of iron that makes it into wine, through the skins and stalks (and even the juice as it’s in some white wines), must be pretty miniscule but it’s enough to make it unpalatable with fish.
Wine is thought to have a fairly low mineral content compared with drinks where the vegetable matter is more aggressively infused into the drink, such as the malt that is ground to make the wort for beer. It makes one wonder how much of these trace elements might be ingested by a regular beer or wine drinker compared with the tiny amounts of these elements put in the average vitamin pill.