How should you choose a wine to match your food? "When they are asked to fill in questionnaires, an awful lot of people say they are interested in what wine goes with what food," says wine consultant Robert Joseph. "But," he points out, "that isn't quite the same thing as pursuing that interest." Most, apparently, aren't keen to make a near-Olympic sport of it. Unsurprisingly. What they are quite interested in is the bit where delicious food and a wine that just works arrive on the table. The solution. Forget the thinking. It's a fairly short-term attention. Fair enough. That's what Robert thought too, and it's why he's just finished a collaboration with McGuigan, the Australian über-producer. I like the concept. Each bottle of wine has a QR code on the label that, when scanned on a smartphone, takes you to a selection of (easy) John Torode recipes - with pictures, ingredients and timings - that would go nicely with it. So you can stand in the supermarket, pluck a bottle from the shelf and conjure up the shopping list for what you need for dinner. I'm a bit less keen on most McGuigan wines, though its sémillon proved pretty handy with a big stuffed sandwich loaf; so for me the service has natural limitations. What a great marriage of technology, taste and convenience, though. There is, of course, nothing revolutionary about the simple task of making suggestions as to what might profitably be drunk with what. I do it every week, for this paper. But everyone seems to be at it at the moment. The Wine Society (TWS) recently added a new "wine matching" section to its website. Like a language dictionary, it works both ways; tell it what you'd like for dinner and ask it to suggest a wine in a particular price bracket (for dim sum, TWS recommends trying pinot grigio/gris, "steely muscadet and dry riesling"), or go in reverse, find a specific bottle and be directed to generic food suggestions. So for Trimbach riesling, for instance, there are almost a dozen suggestions, ranging from carpaccio of beef to salmon and spinach lasagne to choucroute. Oddbins, in its new incarnation, also offers dinner ideas for individual bottles. Some of them more light-hearted (and some of them more elaborate) than others, but I've yet to come across one I don't think would work. A handful to make you hungry: a gourmet burger to go with Maycas del Limari Syrah 2009; spaghetti vongole for the Gufo Bianco 2011; Lancashire hot pot for the Vidal Fleury Ventoux; for the Cortes de Cima red from Portugal they say, simply, "rich, slow-cooked food." Yes, yes, yes. And isn't it fun to go from wine to food rather than vice versa, so you can enjoy the browsing then let the bottle choose your dinner? Among wine nerds there is a great deal of disdain for this sort of thing, which they call "pairing." This is principally because they have not grasped that food suggestions are just that, suggestions, as in a recipe book when a cook helpfully says that such and such a dish is especially delicious with the parsnip and rosemary purée on another page. Speaking for myself, on tired days, of which there are many, or busy days, of which there are also many, such inspiring nuggets save me from yet another pizza from Sainsbury's Local. BBC's Food & Drink, sadly, would not.