When it comes to matching wine and food, I am no knee-jerk color coder! I've had great red-wine-with fish matches, and great white-wine-with-meat matches, that are far too numerous to mention (or even remember!) However, when the food to be matched is meat on the grill--as in the Fourth of July barbecue--I must confess that I usually do see red.

 Why? Well the one thing that red wine normally has that is lacking in white wine is tannin--that scratchy, astringent substance in red wine that comes from grape seeds, grape skins, and, sometimes, the wood in barrels. Tannin creates a tactile sensation--akin to the one you get from drinking overbrewed tea, or biting into the papery part of a walnut. It is not the world's most pleasant sensation, but wine drinkers tolerate it because tannin also acts as a preservative, keeping alive a red wine that has a date with greatness in a few decades or so.

And there's one more reason to like tannin: it beautifully cuts the fat that one normally encounters in red meat. If that grilled steak seems a little rich for you, if those lamb chops seem a little greasy, if that juicy burger's a little too juicy--a gulp of tannin-rich red wine will make your mouth feel cleaner and better (some in southwest France also suggest that tannin will clean your blood vessels of cholesterol, but I can't vouch for that.)

Now, if you have a tannin-rich bottle of red that you'd love to try in its youth--say, one of the great Cabernets from the splendid 1997 vintage in California--but you fear its mouth-scarring potential, the grill also comes in super-handy. Grilled red meat develops a little bitterness from its exterior char--and, because like often cancels out like in wine-and-food matching, that bitterness makes the bitter tannin seem softer. A match made in heaven!

One more piece of advice for grill food and red wine. Some of the meats we Americans like to eat off the grill get some form of sweet condiment: BBQ sauce, ketchup, relish, etc. Lightly sweet food calls for lightly sweet wine--and it's very difficult to find red wine that's not dry. However, if you seek out young, inexpensive Shiraz from Australia--wines from the 2000 vintage are in the marketplace right now--you'll find a slight sweetness that makes these wines perfect accompaniments to that burger with all the fixin's. Rosemount and Peter Lehmann are two Australian wineries that consistently make yummy reds for the barbie.