Last night Betsy combined two Judy Rodgers recipes, the roast chicken
with bread salad, and a recipe for chicken salad with arugula, olives,
and yellow pepper. The suggested wine for the latter was a 1999 Joguet
young vines Chinon*, I brought up a bottle of the 2004 Bernard Baudry
"Les Granges" Chinon. Served cool, straight from cellar. Bright
acidity, black raspberry fruit, light tannins, a little barnyard. As
it warms and gets air it fills out a bit, more black plum fruit, the
merde notes light and in background, a little note of green pepper.
I'm surprised when Betsy says she likes a lot, as she tends to hate
green pepper (in wine or otherwise), but she does- this is just a
hint, not an overpowering greenness. Nice welterweight, very food
friendly, tasty. B+

*so, wine suggestions in cookbooks. On the one hand, you have the
books that give a recipe and then say "merlot." Which encompasses a
whole slew of styles, to the point of being pointless. Then you have
the Zuni Cafe cookbook, where they list things like 1999 Charles
Joquet Jeunes Vignes Chinon (I assume this is what sommelier suggests
at restaurant). But how much help is that? A specific wine, produced
in small quantities, rather hard to find on release. And now that
cookbook is 5 years old, certainly won't find that vintage lying
around. Most of us geeks can extrapolate what they mean from a
specific example, but 99% of the cookbook readers I'm sure have no
clue what a Chinon is.

I'll give my "this is how it should be done" award to Ming Tsai's Blue
Ginger cookbook. He gives specific descriptors of the type of wine he
things works, and then a couple of examples:
Sparkling Chenin from Loire Valley (Foreau or Huet Petillant Brut)
Big rich oaky Merlot (Pride Mountain Merlot, Ch. Monbousquet)
Spicy Cabernet Franc from Loire Valley (Charles Joquet Chinon or
Breton Bourgeuil)
etc (those are ones I just made up, don't have book with me, but you
get idea).
If someone knows nothing about wine, they can at least take the
general descriptor into a decent wine shop and come up with something.