Fonduta with white truffles and Barbera d’Alba

There’s only one pairing I could focus on this week given that I was in Piemonte and that is white truffles. What was the best match? Incredibly hard to say!

There were so many amazing ones - tajarin, the fine, intensely eggy pasta, carne cruda (the Piedmontese version of steak tartare) and a ‘timballo’ of autumn vegetables and truffles among them - but the one I think I’ve got to go for is the fonduta, a wonderful rich eggy fondue lavishly scattered with truffle shavings we had at Trattoria della Posta at Monforte d’Alba which I reviewed here.

I remember I picked out almost exactly the same dish six years ago when I last visited Piedmont though then we had it with one of the local white wines, a Roero Arneis - maybe because the dish also included cardoons.

It is, however, more usual for the Piedmontese to serve a young red wine with a white truffle dish, most commonly a Barbera or a Dolcetto rather than the Barolo I suggested back then. (Barolo would work equally well though they tend to save it for the main course). This time we drank a 2009 Barbera d’Alba Codamonte from Giuseppe Mascarello.

You could, of course, drink white wine with truffle dishes especially with carne cruda - with which we had a rich Gaja Chardonnay. And champagne though that’s obviously not traditional in the region.

Chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble and Bayonne ham with white Bairrada

I’m having a bit of thing about Portuguese wine at the moment - it’s so great with food and such brilliantly good value. Especially on restaurant wine lists where it’s invariably underpriced in comparison to better known wine producing countries and regions

So I zoomed in on the Filipa Pato Enscaios Branco Bairrada 2012* when I spotted it on the Grainstore list the other day hoping it would go with the very different flavours and textures of the dishes we’d ordered.

It did but I think this was the best match: a warm salad of chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble, prune vinegar (didn’t pick that up) and Bayonne ham with a nicely judged combination of sweetness, bitterness, nuttiness and umami which played beautifully with the lushness and richness (but dryness) of the wine, a blend of Arinto and Bical.

It was also good with my more raw-tasting starter of sprouting beans and seeds, miso aubergine and crispy chicken skin which I guess had a fair amount of umami too.

(The menu matches the endive dish with one of the house cocktails - a green tomato Margarita which I must say sounds unlikely. Maybe the numbers have slipped out of sync. Then again maybe not. I need to go back to find out - at least that's my excuse.)

*Happily it's available at Oddbins at £11.75

For my review of Grainstore click here though I did encounter a couple of less successful dishes this time.

Foxlow's 10 hour beef shortrib and Pierre Gonon's Saint-Joseph

I can’t pretend to be wholly impartial about this wine match which comes from Foxlow, the latest restaurant from my son Will and his business partner Huw Gott (who also own Hawksmoor).

I got to see it for the first time last week and immediately pounced on the ribs. This is the beef rib which is cooked for 10 hours and wondrously sticky and smoky. (There’s also an eight hour bacon rib with maple and chilli which You Must Not Miss*)

I’d ordered a bottle of 2010 Pierre Gonon Saint-Joseph from a section of the wine list which has been curated by the brilliant Sager + Wilde wine bar in Hackney. (Charlotte Sager-Wilde used to work for Hawksmoor). There’s going to be a guest page every month which will be fun.

Like many of the wines S + W promote it's traditionally made using natural composts and without any chemical treatments so the syrah has a slightly funky edge that suited the smoky ribs perfectly - and even took the accompanying kimchi in its stride. Try it with the smoked rillettes too ....

*I can also recommend the bacon salt fries and the bourbon caramel soft serve sundae. Oh, and the St John’s cocktail (gin, prune eau de vie, honey and lemon). Not that I’m biased or anything . . .

10 year old Bonnes-Mares grand cru burgundy and confit duck

Rooting round the cellar (well, cupboard under the stairs) in France last week I stumbled across a bottle of 2003 Bonnes-Mares, a Grand Cru burgundy from Jean-Luc Aegerter I’d been sent as a sample about eight years ago and furtively stashed away until it was ready to drink.

The sensible thing would have been to put it to one side - it still had plenty of life in it but sometimes you just think ‘what the heck?’. We decided to crack it open.

I can’t claim the food we had - confit duck and hasselback potatoes - totally did it justice but it was fine. With great bottles like this you don’t necessarily want the food to eclipse the wine.

I might have cooked a roast duck, had I had time to find a good one locally which would have been less aggressively salty. A simply roast chicken, guineafowl or partridge would also have been a good match as would a roast rack of lamb or even a fillet steak. But no heavy extracted sauces.

And definitely not a pungent Epoisses - a pairing of which the French seem inordinately fond but which IMHO would have killed it stone dead.

And the wine? Bright, fine, delicate with a lovely waft of raspberries and redcurrants and a beautiful silky finish - pinot noir at its delectable best.

For more information about Bonnes-Mares, a 15ha vineyard which spans the communes of Chambolle-Musigny and Morey-Saint-Denis see Clive Coates' website here.