Graham Hovey Lecture 2010, Knight-Wallace Fellows at The University of Michigan

The Odd Couple: Newspapers and the Internet—Will They Ever Get Along? 

Gerard Ryle ’06 and his wife Kimberley Porteous ’06S - respectively, news editor and multimedia editor of The Sydney Morning Herald — delivered KWF’s first joint Hovey Lecture on September 10.

Video: Gerard's address

Video: My address

Matching wine to sushi

Sushi is practically Australia's national dish these days, and is certainly a lunch staple for Sydney office workers. But what about when you eat it after the sun goes down?

Let me make a confession: I don't actually crave a glass of wine when I eat sushi. A Japanese meal seems somehow self-contained, unlike the way, say, an Italian or French dish cries out for wine accompaniment.

But enough of us do want to drink wine with sushi, rather than sake (an ideal, if potent, choice) or beer or green tea with roasted rice.

The various flavours of a Japanese meal combine to create a complex and heady mix: there's sweet rice and mirin rice vinegar, the salty umami from shoyu or tamari, the sinus-tingling zap of wasabi, and the rich oiliness of salmon in nigiri sushi and sashimi.

When you have all of these powerful flavours you need a crisp wine – in most cases a white. Think about something with a clean, fresh flavour, maybe with high acids to cut through the opulent fats of the raw fish. And it would be best, I think, to drink it icy cold for maximum refreshment.

I won't even begin to attempt to match different types of fish to various wines; let's leave that to the serious wine bores.