Wine, cheese, tomatoes

We judge taste on autopilot almost all the time: eat it, move on. Put three versions of the same thing side by side and compare them deliberately, and differences you never noticed surface within a couple of minutes — and that isn't only true of food.

Buy three different cheeses (say a soft one, an aged hard one and a blue), three kinds of tomato (ordinary, cherry, and large meaty or yellow ones) and good bread. Add a bottle of wine — or, if you don't drink, alcohol-free wine, grape juice or kombucha: the point is the pairing, not the alcohol. Lay it all out on a board. Taste each thing on its own first, with a sip of water between bites. Then start combining: every cheese with every tomato, with a sip alongside. Out of the nine pairs, one or two will be clearly better than the rest — find them. Keep salt and olive oil at hand; they change the picture. Don't rush, an hour and a half is normal. ⚠️ If you're driving, the alcohol-free version only.

Which pairing turned out best — and would you have guessed it without tasting?