Tuna Tataki and Grenache Blanc

Perfectly prepared Japanese food is not what you expect to find in the gastronomic desert of the Languedoc but this superb dish of rare tuna was a brilliant match for the richly textured white wine I drank at Côté Mas the other day.

The newly opened restaurant just outside Montagnac belongs to Jean-Claude Mas and is a major step forward for Languedoc wine tourism. He has installed a Japanese chef - Taïchi Megurikami - his marketing manager Brigitte told me, not to cook Japanese food but to bring Japanese influences and precision to the local cuisine.

The dish, which was part of a tasting plate of starters, was outstanding: a beautifully cut piece of tuna, served almost sashimi-rare, lightly rolled in finely chopped herbs and served with a julienned salad of cucumber and whipped cream with wasabi.

It was paired with the 2012 Mas des Tannes Reserve Blanc an unctuous, oily Grenache Blanc which had exactly the right texture and flavour for the soft, almost buttery fish.

At Côté Mas you can buy the wine from the shop and pay just 5€ corkage (or order it by the glass for 3€) but even in the UK it’s not a bad deal. Noel Young has it for £10.95 a bottle or £9.83 if you buy a case and Soho Wine Supply for £10.99.

Probably a good style of wine to pair with other Japanese dishes, I suspect.

I ate at Côté Mas as a guest of Domaine Paul Mas.

Pasta arrabbiata with sangiovese

What happens when you choose a wine to pair with a particular dish and the dish doesn’t materialise? Well, if you’re lucky it matches equally well.

Arrriving back in Languedoc yesterday evening (a Sunday) with all the local shops shut we breathed a sigh of relief that there was at least the local pizzeria - pulling out a robust bottle of Tuscan red, Il Secondo di Pacina 2010, to go with it.

Trouble was the pizzaria’s oven had broken down so NO pizza.

Fortunately we had some pasta - as always - in the cupboard so I made a scratch supper with a very pokey tomato sauce with a LOT of garlic, bacon, passata and a spoonful of hot pimenton which I realised afterwards was pretty well identical not only to an arrabbiatta as you can see from this recipe but to the near identical pasta sauce I made a year ago. Which goes to show either that I’m a cook of limited imagination or that it’s a super-reliable match.

You could obviously also drink other sangioveses with this type of pasta or - possibly even more appropriate - a southern Italian or a Sicilian red like a negroamaro or a primitivo - but not too modern or jammy a style

Whitebait and Muscadet-sur-Lie

Regulars may have noticed a distinct French bias in my matches of the week and have wondered why this is. The truth is that my husband is an unreconstructed Francophile so French wine is mainly what we drink at home and what we order if we’re out together.

No surprise then that the wine we chose to drink at our local seafood restaurant, Fisher’s in Bristol last night was a Muscadet* and that it proved a sufficiently good pairing to make my match of the week. (There was also a fair bit of rosé drunk in France last week which hit the spot with most of the things we were eating . . .)

Whitebait has quite a strong oily taste so is normally coated with a spicy chilli-spiked batter but this was served conservatively seasoned so needed the lemony sharpness of the Muscadet to give it a kick.

Looking at other possibilities outside France I’d go for Albarino (always good with seafood), Vinho Verde (goes with sardines so why not whitebait?), Austrian Gruner Veltliner, Hunter Valley semillon, verdelho, more minerally sauvignon blancs and almost any kind of crisp, unoaked Italian white.

Only I probably won’t get the chance to try them out ;-)

* We were so tired after travelling all day I forgot to check the producer but Fisher’s website shows the Domaine de la Tourmaline 2010. I suspect it was a more recent vintage. Majestic is selling the 2012 for £6.99 at the moment.

Venison and Cot (Malbec)

The most successful wine pairing from a tasting I hosted on behalf of Touraine wines the other day was not the expected sauvignon and goats cheese or even fish and chips but a rich gamey dish of venison with a robust Cot, the name by which Malbec is known in the Loire.

You might think that Loire reds tend to be on the light side and that’s generally true but this wine, Henry Marionnet Vinifera 2010 (13.5% and £10.95 from the Wine Society), was really robust and smoky itself with quite a touch of funk. It was made from ungrafted vines which gave it a particularly intense character.

It would also match, I reckon, with gamey pheasant or pigeon dishes, mixed game casseroles and pies and with offal, especially kidneys. Probably stinky cheeses too - a pairing the Wine Society also seems to favour.

It goes to prove my theory that there’s always an unexpected and exciting find in any food and wine tasting you do.

Photo © Jeanne Horak-Druiff of CookSister