So, which wine would you pair with these delicious, autumnal ravioli? I have some thoughts but will hold them for the comments.

To anticipate your comments, I didn’t call it “impossible” as is my wont, because it’s merely a tricky blend of sweet, salt, fat and herbs.

If you want an impossible pairing for this week, surf over to the WSJ and read Jonathan Safran Foer on eating dog. But apparently eating a low-fat diet will make you less pissy than eating a low carb diet, so maybe staying here and thinking about pasta will put you in a better mood.

As candy washes over the country these days in a giant, wrapper-encrusted wave, it seems only timely: which wine goes with Halloween candy? Or is it impossible?!?

Please make your candy suggestions as trashy as possible–no gourmet chocolates here, just Reese’s peanut butter cups, KitKats, Almond Joy, Butterfinger, Pop Rocks and/or Necco wafers.

For those of you who cannot fathom pairing candy and wine, then play sommelier for Paul Rudnick: as profiled in yesterday’s NYT, the 51 year old man weighs 150 pounds and subsist almost entirely on candy.

Sushi, it’s still all the rage! Despite warnings from the NYT dining section about mercury levels and an economy that is softer than a fatty toro, the WSJ recently declared that “recession or no recession,” sushi “is not going anywhere.” “Iron Chef” Masaharu Morimoto pointed to the the ubiquity of sushi to go places as a sign of the degree to which it is now embedded in our culture.

You don’t have to love sushi as much as Jeremy Piven to think about which wine pairs with this delectable treat. Why not go with a trio of commonly ordered items such as salmon nigiri, tuna maki and tamago? (Or add your own favorite.) Which wine would you pair with sushi–or is it impossible?!?

Or at least at the Winston-Salem, North Carolina fair, where a reporter filed this tasting note from the fairgrounds:

Fried cheese is heaven. Would fried butter be Nirvana? We had to find out…Will fried butter be this year’s runaway food sensation of the Dixie Classic Fair? Well, it’s novel. It’s tasty. But it’s no funnel cake, just this year’s fad. But it’s also hard to top. It’s a fluffy, airy pocket of fried batter, basically — the heat of the oil melts most of the butter — sweet and salty at the same time. We felt invigorated. We felt sick.

So what do you say, what goes with deep fried butter–or is it impossible?!? (Sugar, as depicted above, is optional.) And if you think this is hard, at least I didn’t challenge you with this week’s atrocity, Paula Deen’s donut bacon cheeseburger.

If you’re looking for more traditional fare, we previously tried our hand at pairing wine with butternut squash soup.

HE dumps salt on almost everything, even saltine crackers. He devours burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches. He has a weakness for hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and fried chicken, washing them down with a glass of merlot.

Whoa–talk about impossible food-wine pairings!! Surely we can do better for Mayor Mike than merlot? Which wine with you pair with burnt bacon and peanut butter sandwiches? Or are they…impossible?!? Answer well and it could lead to Senior Pairings Expert in a possible future Bloomberg administration?!

Related: Elvis’ version of the peanut butter, bacon, banana (!) and butter (!!) sandwich

So before the summer weather escapes us and our dining is driven indoors, which wine would you pair with cucumber soup? Or is it…impossible?!?

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It’s that time of year when millions of Americans gather around campfires, saying “I hate white rabbits” as they try to get out of the smoke. Of course, once positioned upwind, thoughts inevitably turn to…S’mores! Yes, what would summer be like without a booster shot of high fructose corn syrup in the form of graham crackers sandwiching molten marshmallows with a slab of Hershey’s chocolate?

And a wine lover’s thoughts might also drift to an inevitable pairing with wine! Which wine goes with smores? Or are they…impossible?!?

(As an aside, above you can see my s’mores technique of trying to melt the chocolate on a rock close to the fire. Didn’t work so well. Hit the comments with your preferred technique and/or ingredients.)

So easy to make and so fresh: Some tomatoes, a cucumber, a little red onion, a garlic clove, some vinegar…Mmm!

But tomatoes have high acidity and vinegar is wine gone bad, which is always hard to pair with good wine.

Which wine would you pair with a bowl of gazpacho? Or is it…impossible?!?

Now a sommelier is trying to break food-wine pairing down to a molecular level. According to a story in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, François Chartier is making the “corkscrew counterpart of molecular gastronomy.” His new book, Papilles et molécules (Tastebuds and Molecules) is apparently selling like hotcakes that have been reduced to a mere powder and then reconstituted as foam.

Many of the pairings reaffirm the classics such as oysters with muscadet and sauternes with foie gras, so score one for intuition.

But others defy conventional wisdom. To the tape:

Perhaps Mr. Chartier’s most controversial recommendation is high-alcohol wines with spicy foods. Conventional thinking in wine-nerd circles has long been that alcohol fuels the fire. But Mr. Chartier says it’s simply not true. For what it’s worth, I think he’s right; try spicy Thai dishes with high-alcohol gewurztraminer from Alsace or red zinfandel from California and be amazed by the synergy.

What do you think, a little ripasso with your Thai red curry? Zinfandel and chicken jalfrezi? Personally, I’m inclined toward a Mosel Riesling. But I’ll try anything once!

We haven’t done one of these “impossible” pairings for a while. What with such nontraditional calorie bombs as the bacon explosion and the oreo tower under our proverbial belts already, perhaps we should ease back into this theme with something a little, er, lighter (albeit not by much) or at least more conventional.

So have at it: which wine would you pair with fish and chips? Or is it…impossible?!?

Robin Goldstein, author of The Wine Trials and chef/owner of a fake, Wine Spectator award-winning restaurant, is the lead author on the working paper from the American Association of Wine Economists.

The researchers served pureed Newman’s Own dog food alongside duck-liver mousse, pork-liver pâté, puréed liverwurst, and Spam. Of the 18 volunteers (who are these people?), only three could correctly identify the dog food.

So the question on the minds of wine lovers–and dogs–everywhere is: which wine pairs with dog food? A Sauternes? Late-harvest Gewurztraminer? Or is it…impossible?

I didn’t get a chance to try the inky black, 14.9% alcohol shiraz before the bottle was drained by other guests. But I did ponder for a moment the name, Layer Cake, which is the absolute antithesis of what I would think the wine is all about or what I would pair it with. Apparently, there’s also a wine called “Cupcake” that makes cabernet and chardonnay among other dry wines. Frankly, I think these names are headed down the wrong track since cakes may be fun, but they aren’t really amenable to wine pairings.

Or wait: are they? Which wine would you pair with cupcakes? Or are they…impossible?

But that vertiginous traffic spike is not the only thing that will leave you feeling woozy; such dishes as the Turbaconducken (a chicken and a duck cooked inside a turkey, which is, in turn, covered in bacon), the 60-pound Rice Krispie treat, the seven pound breakfast burrito, or the meat ship (made from bacon, sausages, pastry, franks and pork mince) ought to do it as well.

There are so many things on there that are impossible to pair with wine we should really have it as the sister site to our impossible food-wine pairings! But in the spirit of Valentine’s Day, let’s just tackle a chocolate one: the mega double stuff Oreo, photographed at right. So just which wine would you pair with that blend of hydrogenated soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, soy lecithin, and chocolate? Or is it…impossible? Or feel free to weigh in (ahem) on any of the other delicacies on the site that strikes your fancy.

So what say: is this an impossible food to digest pair with wine?

Unlike our impossible food-wine pairings, pizza is one of those very possible wine pairings. But not in one country: Italy.

Jeremy Parzen pointed out this shocking claim in the comments of a recent post on his blog : “…no one pairs wine with pizza in Italy! I’m sorry, they just don’t…” He added later via email, “like Italians’ aversion to dairy and fish, or coffee and savory, the pizza/beer pairing is relatively sacred… they never pair pizza with wine… wine lists in Italian pizzerie are for tourists.” (Let’s hope they’re not pairing the lackluster Peroni with that pizza.)

Forbidden as it may be in Italy, prove the Italians wrong and tell us what is your preferred pairing for a pizza margherita? Are you in the white, light red (Barbera, Chianti), or the full-bodied (Nero d’Avola, Shiraz, Zinfandel) camp? I prefer reds with higher acidity to cut through the protein and fat of the cheese and stand up to acidity in the the tomato.

I suppose if we really wanted an impossible food-wine pairing, there’s always deep dish pizza…