White onion and cheddar tart and Mayacamas chardonnay

I was really spoilt for choice with wine pairings at Claridges last week. (It’s not often I get to write a sentence like that …)

When you eat in their restaurant you can choose a bottle to go with the meal from the enviable selection in the shop downstairs, the only problem being settling on which one.

One solution is to work out roughly what you have in mind to eat before you go down there, a decision made rather easier by choosing from the very good value (for Claridges) set price lunch or pre-theatre. menu which is £49 for two courses or £58 for 3.

My companion, fellow winelover Barry Smith and I worked out that if we chose a red we would go for the ballotine of confit duck and the lamb navarin while if we chose a white we’d opt for the white onion and cheddar tart and Cornish brill with clams and seaweed butter.

In the event we discovered from head sommelier Emma Denney that they also had a 2018 Maycamas chardonnay from the Napa Valley on by the glass which meant one of us could have the tart and the other the ballotine with the bottle of Domaine 2005 Blagny La Pièce sous le Bois, a lesser known and comparatively modestly priced burgundy Barry had spotted on the shelves.

It also went really well with the navarin but the standout match for me was the chardonnay and the cheddar tart.

I’ve tried chardonnay with cheddar before but this wine, which had a wonderfully refreshing acidity you don’t always associate with Californian chardonnay, took the pairing to another level.

You can also buy it by the bottle from Claridges Wine Cellar for £75 (at the time of writing) which is great value given it’s £50 by the glass and read about it here,

Next time you have cheese and onion quiche think chardonnay …

See also The Best Wine Pairings for Cheddar Cheese

And for other chardonnay pairings The Best Food to pair with Chardonnay

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Claridges

Bacchus with asparagus with gnocchi and wild garlic pesto

With the home grown asparagus season kicking off and wild garlic in full bloom you may well be thinking of combining the two as my friend TV presenter Andy Clarke did this weekend when a group of us stayed at Wraxall vineyard in Somerset.

Andy had devised the dish to go with Wraxall’s Bacchus which it did perfectly.

Bacchus is a grape variety that does well in England. As the website Grape Britannia explains, it’s a cross of Muller-Thurgau with a Silvaner/Riesling cross, Silvaner itself being a cross of Traminer and Oesterreichish Weiss, while Muller-Thurgau is a Riesling/Madeleine Royal cross.

If you find it hard getting your head round this (me too!) just think of it as England’s answer to sauvignon blanc.

I personally liked the pairing of the delicate unoaked 2021 Wraxall Bacchus which you can buy from their website for £18 a bottle best with the assertive flavours of asparagus and wild garlic but the oaked version, which won a silver medal last year in the Independent English Wine Awards, picked up on the buttery toasted crumbs which Andy had scattered over the dish and would be a good match for richer, creamier sauces.

Anyway bear in mind Bacchus with asparagus over the next few weeks - and beyond.

For other Bacchus pairings see here 

Baba with rum

Yes, you did read that right. Baba with rum not rum baba.

It was one of the dishes that was served by top pastry chef Pierre Hermé at the Constance Festival Culinaire in Mauritius as a finale to the multi-Michelin-starred tribute dinner for chef Serge Vieira who tragically died last year at the age of 46.

Described - as only the French can - as baba infiniment exotique it was paired with a local Mauritian spiced rum liqueur, Chamarel Vanille. which undergoes a second maturation in a cask to which vanilla is added.

What Pierre had done was take the rum out of the baba and serve it alongside as a drink pairing. Which was an absolute game changer, leaving the cake much fresher and lighter. It was served on a bed of passionfruit and finely sliced pineapple and fine shards of chocolate all of which went with the Chamarel rum liqueur too.

You can buy it in the UK from Master of Malt for £36.55.

It's hard to think of a wine pairing that would have worked as well.

More food and wine matches from the festival shortly including the pairings for the Deutz trophy for which I was one of the judges.

Roast veal and Gevrey-Chambertin

My general rule is not to buy burgundy or other expensive wines on a wine list because the mark-ups are just too painful but celebrating a friend’s big birthday at Bouchon Racine in London the other day it proved too hard to resist.

We’d chosen a sharing plate of best end of veal with morels and pommes mousseline (buttery potato purée) and were looking at light reds such as Beaujolais but kept being drawn back to the higher reaches of the list. Eventually we couldn’t resist a 2021 Frédéric Magnien Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes which sounded rather too young to drink but we hoped would hit the spot as indeed it did.

It was heady and fragrant, full of wonderfully pure fruit which showed off the delicate flavour of the veal and morels and an unctuously creamy sauce.

Sure, it would have been more affordable if I’d cooked for my friend or he for me and one of us had brought along a older bottle but then neither of us would have got our hands on such amazing ingredients and cooked them as well.

You can buy the wine from Yapp Brothers for £56 t which is obviously not cheap but not bad value for burgundy, especially Gevrey.

Occasionally it’s good just to splurge.