Simply - First and foremost one should drink the kind of wine that one enjoys.
Simply - Lighter styles of wine match with lighter styles of food.
Simply - Match the wine not to the meat,  fish, poultry or main dish as much as it should be match to the way the meat, fish, poultry or main dish  is prepared.

The rule of white with chicken and red with beef has long been out of style.  Since the inception of nouveau cuisine it's not just "meat & potatoes" anymore!  BBQ chicken may match better with a Zinfandel (Red) while Alfredo chicken may be better with a buttery chardonnay.  A sausage stuffed mushroom appetizer might match nicely with a full bodied Viognier (white) or a spicy Malbec (red).  Purely personal preference.

The complexity of matching wines with food is based largely on two human senses - taste and smell. Surprising to most people is that the flavor sensation from wine is not so much derived from the tongue as it is from the nose!  

While the tongue is divided into 4 zones, each able to distinguish one of the four following - Bitter, Sour, Salty, and Sweet - the nose is far superior in detecting concentrations of odor - up to the parts per million quantity.  As every mother has told her children - " Hold your nose when you take the medicine and you won't even taste it!" 

When drinking wines you enjoy - or even don't enjoy - pay attention to how it affects your palate.  The back of your tongue will be affected by bitter tastes, the back sides of the mouth detect sour, the front sides are influenced by salty and the tip of the tongue senses sweetness. 

The nose can distinguish a myriad of smells in even the smallest trace amounts.  Many times a wine may be said to "be reminiscent" of a particular odor.  In the same way that one person may smell onion cooking and be reminded of mom's good home cooking, another may be reminded of KP Duty pealing oodles of onions, weeping throughout.  Each person smells onions, but with quite a different emotional response.  So it is with the "nose of the wine"  Speaking of this, visit www.thenoseofwine.com for more information.

When choosing wine and food pairings - keep the following in mind. (From www.ivillage.com) 

• Sweet Foods like Italian tomato sauce, Japanese teriyaki, and honey-mustard glazes make your wine seem drier than it is so try an off-dry (slightly sweet) wine to balance the flavor (Chenin Blanc, White Zinfandel, Riesling).
• High Acid Foods like salads with balsamic vinaigrette dressing, soy sauce or fish served with a squeeze of lemon go well with wines higher in acid (Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Noir). White Zinfandel, although not as high in acid, can prove a nice contract to high acid foods.
•  Bitter and Astringent (Tannic) Foods like a mixed green salad of bitter greens, Greek kalamata olives and charbroiled meats accentuate a wine's bitterness so complement it with a full-flavored forward fruity wine (Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot). Big tannic red wines (like many red Zinfandels and Shiraz or Syrah) will go best with your classic grilled steak or lamb chips, as the fat in the meat will tone down the tannin (bitterness) in the wine.

Furthermore -
Sourness. You may have heard people say that wine doesn't go with salad. The reason this wrong idea gets such wide play is that the acid in salad dressing can wreak havoc with some wines. But if you serve an acidic wine with that salad, the wine's sourness is negated by the salad's sourness--leading to a pleasant, successful match. Remember: Pick acidic wines, such as dry German Riesling, dry Vinho Verde or red Sancerre, for acidic foods. Acidic wines also are terrific for salty foods; briny French oysters are insanely good with crisp Muscadet, a dry white wine made near Brittany in France, and smoked salmon is a miracle with tart Mosel Riesling (made in one of Germany's most northerly regions, the Mosel).

Sweetness. During the main part of your meal, and at dessert time, the same like-with-like principle applies: Sweet food makes sweet wine taste less sweet. If you have, say, a California Chardonnay that's a little sweet, as many of them are, it may taste oddly sweet with a piece of grilled swordfish. But put a little mango-red pepper salsa on the fish, and the wine will now taste miraculously dry. At dessert time, a mildly sweet wine can be wiped out--turned to disagreeable lemon juice--by a very sweet dessert. But if you make sure the dessert wine is at least a little bit sweeter than the dessert itself (such as Sauternes with a light pound cake), the wine will retain its sweetness (desirable at dessert).

Bitterness. Once again, like-with-like is the key: Wines with a little bitterness make foods with a little bitterness taste less bitter. Let's say you love charred steak on the grill but don't love the slight bitterness that the grill imparts. Young Cabernet from Bordeaux or California also has bitterness from tannin, a substance found in grape skins, seeds and stems that finds its way into many young reds. The solution is at hand: Serve them together and watch the bitterness of each one disappear.

Saltiness. There are no salty wines, but there are plenty of wines that relieve the saltiness of salty food. Serve acidic, un-oaky (see below), low-alcohol wines, such as Vinho Verde from Portugal or Galestro from Italy, with salty food. It's the same principle you see around the world in the service of fish: The classic mate for briny stuff from the sea is lemon, because acidity cuts salt.

Tannin, Alcohol, Oak and Fruit
There are a few elements in wine (not in food) that also contribute to the roster of principles: tannin, alcohol, oakiness and fruit. Tannin, a bitter, astringent substance in wine, is good with fatty, grilled meats. Alcohol is not a friend of food; generally lower-alcohol wines, such as German Riesling and the Basque Tyokali, are flexible with food (heaven is a dry white below 12% alcohol). The taste of new oak turns up in many wines today, because the wines are stored in new oak barrels that impart flavor. Oaky wine, however, is rarely a friend of food. Lastly, "fruit" is an important concept. All wine comes from fruit, of course, but some wines taste "fruitier" than others. Wines are fruitiest when they're young, then lose that fruit as they age. The fruit of white wine can be almost oppressive--sometimes it tastes like fruity bubble gum--and can get in the way of food. Young New World white wines tend to be very fruity, young European white wines less so. But the fruit of young red wines, which is subtler than the fruit of young white wines, is often a boon in food-matching. In young reds, the fruit tends to cover up some of red wine's food-difficult elements (like tannin and bitterness), actually making the red wine even better for food. www.foodtv.com