A great idea and potentially strong feature amongst Snooth's growing bevy. I imagine a lot of work has already gone into what we now see, and even more is intended for the future. With all that, it still seems like there are a few bugs to work out at the present.

I just did a quick and dirty scan of a few arbitrary wines that I know well, listed in order of viewing:
--Cakebread cabernet
--Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle
--Chateau Latour (Pauillac)
--Chalone chardonnay

I got less impressed as I went along, I'm afraid, though things shouldn't be all that hard to fix.

First of all, I only saw offerings from Epicurious, a site that I've used several times as reference for dishes I want to create, so I have a feel for them. I agreed with the suitability of the dishes for Cakebread, but wondered how many people would actually make them. I disagreed with two of the three for La Chapelle, wondering about the range proferred and also the content of those two in match with the wine. Then when I went to the Latour I was surprised to see 3 chicken dishes (out of a total of three shone) offered for the '82 (one with a vinaigrette sauce!), three chicken dishes for the '70, three chicken dishes for the 2000 and two chicken dishes plus a vegetable meatloaf for the 2005 (which shouldn't be suggested for serving for years, anyway, I suppose). I then jumped to a link from the Latour page to a *'28* Chateau Mouton Rothschild. Surprise! Three chicken dishes. I don't think I'd want any food with a '28 Mouton, myself. ;-) Then I went to the Chalone chardonnay, and again surprise! Two chicken dishes and (yikes!!) a meatball hero sandwich...

My idea of matches, such as in the La Chapelle case, may reflect only my sensibilities, and not be representative of any major segment of the population. But I think you might be able to quickly improve things by:
a) *at least* doubling in number the sampling of recipes,
b) adding sources other than Epicurious (though I realize several of the issues in keeping your partners happy),
c) having some live person who really knows wine and food do the grunt work of auditing things on a regular basis,
d) setting up a hotline button at the same location on the page where the recipes are cited for user feedback (being sure to respond to the feedback in some reasonable fashion),
e) trying to factor in different matching requirements for a 5-year-old vs. a 40-year-old vintage of the same wine,
f) perhaps adding some comments at the top of the recipe list about the philosophy behind (that is, the principles and requirements for a match with this type of wine) and elements of a match with the wine,
g) while broadening the range of food-choice options, also trying to leaven the recipe mixture with a few simpler offerings to draw more people who are less into food preparation into the process, and not scare them off, and
h) including proportionately less chicken, please!

Not being privy to your planning, some or all of these ideas may not be entirely new. Just reacting off what I see now.

Good luck with all the new work, and I'll be looking forward to seeing some inspirational matches!

Hi Dm,

and thanks for the feedback.

There are several issues at play here and while I can't get too detailed I can say that the Hermitage and Latour matches were no good because of an issue with the pricing. This system was designed to work my pairing a recipe with wine. In order to make the wines valuable for the broadest market the algorithm imposes a pricing cap on the wines. When we then go to pull the reverse matches it's as if those wines don't exist so they then get paired with default recipes.

We are working on a fix for that issue and I would expect you might see better matches soon such as:http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Venison-Chops-with-Blackberry-Compote-109323

And the Latour might find a match like:http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Filets-Mignons-with-Mushroom-Sauce-10050

AS you can imagine this is very much a work in progress. It's only by having users such as yourself offer comments and feedback that we can discover the issues we have and remedy the problems they cause.

Once we get these issues resolved we will be able to work towards refining the matching to take into account issues such as the relative level of maturity of the wine, types of cuisine and such.

As Philip alludes to our repertoire of recipes is destined to increase. Unfortunately the percentage of chicken recipes is most likely destined to remain fairly constant though it appears that the surfeit of chicken at the moment is due to a programing glitch as opposed to an anti-avian predilection on my part.

Just rest assured we are hard at work making this the best it can be though certain issues will always allow for quibbles and questions.