Choosing the appropriate wine to go with dinner has been made easier by experts who suggest, "serve red wine with red meat and white wine with fish."   Are there fundamental reasons for this?

Red wine is usually drunk with red meat because of a desirable matching of the chemicals found in each.  The most influential ingredient in red meat is fat; it gives red meats their desirable flavor.  As you chew a piece of red meat, the fat from the meat coats your tongue and palate, which desensitizes your taste buds.  As a result, your second bite of red meat is less tasty than the first.  But there is an easy way to wash away these fat deposits.

Red wine cleanses fat deposits left on your tongue from red meat, allowing the flavor of the meat to remain strong until the end of the meal. (V. Holtgrewe)

Red wine contains a surfactant that cleanses your mouth, removing fat deposits, re-exposing your taste buds, and allowing you to savor the next bite of red meat almost as well as the first bite.  The tannic acid in red wine provides a soap-like action.    Like soap, tannic acid consists of both a nonpolar complex hydrocarbon part as well as a polar one.  The polar part of tannic acid dissolves in polar saliva, while the nonpolar part dissolves in the fat film that coats your palate.  When you sip red wine, a suspension of micelles forms in the saliva.  This micelle emulsion has the fat molecules in its interior; the fat is washed away by swallowing the red wine.

Whitten/Davis/Peck:  General Chemistry with Qualitative Analysis,  5/e,  p. 535