Just Three: Polenta, Eggs, Mushrooms

Which came first, the bottle or the plate? Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, food/wine, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine. In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, at least in the fractional hectare of the 707 area code delineated by my family's split-rail fence line, the debate over the hierarchical structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll be neither fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. And I seriously doubt that I'm alone in building menus around bottles at least as often as choosing wines to match food.

Context, perhaps, is warranted: My wife is on what I can like to call a Chard bender, and the wine racks where we keep our whites look a bit like the maples of her youth (she's a transplanted Right Coaster) come the first snows of November: You know they were full, you can quite clearly remember seeing them shot through with color and promise (although you can't quite place the date), but all that stands in front of you today is dry wood and the lonely spaces between. This is, to be clear, an issue of frequency, not of quantity, because my wife doesn't really drink all that much. However,  and here again I count my blessings, she is happy enough to drink small quantities frequently, thereby encouraging both my regular raids on the family cellar and my predilection for pigging, but also - when the Chard bender is in full effect - leading to Saharan absences of the one white varietal that will acceptably whet her cute little whistle.