When it comes to real food and drink, there’s no such thing as consistency. And that’s something that should be embraced

WHEN it comes to real food and drink, there’s no such thing as consistency. And that’s something that should be embraced.

My sister-in-law only drinks one type of wine. It’s a well known brand that’s a blend of various grapes and she swears by it (and after a few glasses of it), feels confident with it and will never try another. While I can’t help feeling she’s missing something, it’s her prerogative. However, as a result, she tells everybody that the best wines only come from this particular part of Australia. Which is a shame. Because it’s patently not true.

Good wines come from all over the place and depend on the infinite combination of a number of factors including, but not exhaustively, the winemaker him or herself, the “recipe” and methods they’re using and the infinite variety in the hour-to-hour weather from one year to the next.

Some winemakers go to extraordinary lengths to make sure that their wine is always the same, despite the natural and other variances. Go to the main Champagne houses and they will show you how they have incredibly able tasters who sit in a room with dozens of samples of wine, mixing them in tiny quantities in order to make this year’s non-vintage Champagne taste exactly like last year’s, and the year’s before, and the year’s before that and so on. One I visited a couple of years ago said they blended more than 90 wines to get that year’s staple brand. My sister-in-law would love them.

But most things in life aren’t like that. There are people who’ll only buy one make of car and have done for decades. It’s obviously something inside their head that makes them do it because few car companies have stayed the same, bringing out the same car year after year, with their standards never changing and without some quirk rearing its head to annoy you. And we’ve all experienced the bad car, the one that might have been made on a Monday morning by the guy with the hangover, or the grudge against the company, or who’s just had a row with his wife, or girlfriend, or both.

This consistency thing came to me when drinking that most consistent of things some time ago: milk. I like milk. And sometimes only a really cold glass of milk will do. We nearly always get our milk from the same producer and somehow I’ve always expected it to always taste exactly the same. But, when you really start studying it, it doesn’t. That day the milk definitely tasted a bit more chalky than normal. That woke me up so I started monitoring and realised that sometimes it was a little creamier, other times sweeter and so on.

And, of course, when you think about it, it’s going to. For a start, unless you always get your milk from the same dairy herd there’s likely to be some differences. And even the same herd is moved from field to field from time to time, where the stuff they eat may be different. And the seasons are going to produce different input for them to chew on as well which will affect the milk.

So on that basis, meat we get from an animal will change as well. As a restaurateur I frequently hear the “I love a fillet steak” or similar. Well yes, but it so, so depends on the meat itself which in turn depends on the way it’s been bred, what breed it is, the sex of the animal, how it’s been reared, what it’s been fed, how it was transported then slaughtered, how long it was hung and in what conditions, how it was butchered and then, believe it or not, how it was cooked.

As a result, meat varies to an incredible extent. Cutting corners to reduce cost invariably has a detrimental effect. It’s why at the restaurant we go to such efforts to source our meat but then, to keep the cost down, we have to look at using the whole animal which means developing new skills and imaginative cooking techniques.

It’s why we should be wary, for instance, of incredibly cheap steak deals. Where’s the meat come from? And, in some cases believe it or not, is it really beef steak? And it’s why I’m not particularly turned on by the meat in supermarkets. Do you really want to be eating beef that’s so red? How long has it really been hung and is that Aberdeen Angus truly that, or some mix of breed? I promise you, all these things make a difference.

Therefore it pays to understand your sources. The “I like Chilean Merlot” or whatever doesn’t really hold up. Two neighbouring wine farms using the same grapes could make two very different wines. And the same goes for your steak, or your pork or your chicken.

Well anyway, who wants things never to change? You do? I know a nice “drive-thru” burger bar that’ll suit you just fine.