Leeks, celery, carrots, cannellini beans and some herbs. Epicurious says put all that together and you’ll have an excellent vegetarian cassoulet. User comments strongly suggest using vegetable stock instead of water. But what about the wine?

Two year old wine social network Snooth announced today that it is now powering wine recommendations for the 25,000 editor tested recipes on Conde Nast’s food site Epicurious. Snooth says this is just the first of a number of big sites that its custom algorithm will power recommendations on. That cassoulet? Snooth suggests you serve a Montevina Terra d’Oro Syrah 2002 ($15) with it. Nice.

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Wine with food has got to be one of the most familiar kinds of recommendations offline, but the online recommendation technology industry is a fast growing one. The belief is that quality recommendations will serve as searches you never knew you wanted to perform – helping users navigate from one logical option to another, possibly making more purchases as a result and hopefully being better served by the websites they visit.

A food site with good wine recommendations sounds pretty tasty to me. Snooth says its recommendations are based on ingredients, cuisine and cooking method. (Crowd-sourced wine recommendations are one thing – perhaps the next step will be to create a cross-site social network that lets Epicurious visitors query their favorite, trusted Snooth users for recommendations.) It’s hard to know from the outside what all this really means, so we’ll all just have to try lots of different meals and bottles of wine in order to evaluate the quality of the recommendations offered.

Nibbledish, Cookstr, Chow? All cool recipe sites but no wine recommendations – it’s easy to see how recommendations can provide a competitive advantage in a niche like this.

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