Brill with oxtail and Domaine Tempier Bandol

About the most unlikely wine match you could imagine - a delicate fish with a 19 year old red wine - but it worked! Which shows you can always be surprised by food and wine pairing.

It was at Bell’s Diner in Bristol and a very bold surf’n’turf dish. The key to the match was the accompanying braised oxtail which was subtle enough not to overwhelm the fish but robust enough to call for a red rather than a white.

You wouldn’t want to drink even a mature wine like this with brill on its own or with much lighter accompaniments, obviously - or at least I wouldn’t. And a younger Bandol or mourvèdre would have certainly overwhelmed the dish, even with the oxtail.

I’ve written about this Domaine Tempier vintage before. It’s a favourite wine and when we had it at The Nobody Inn last summer we bought two extra bottles, one of which we demolished at this dinner. (We had the opportunity to bring our own wine).

A wine that can work with steak and ale pie AND with white fish. Now that is something!

Slow roast pork belly with a ‘Gardener’s Old Fashioned’

Pork and apple is, of course, a match made in heaven but the pairing was taken to new heights for me by mixologist Jack Adair Bevan of The Ethicurean who invented an Old Fashioned cocktail with a twist to go with a dish of slow roast pork.

The recipe had a few clever bells and whistles of its own. The Saddleback pork had been roasted for 12 hours to a fall-apart texture and was accompanied by pickled shitake, apple and chipotle crackling salt (pulverised pork crackling, seasoned with chipotle)

But the drink was something else - an Old Fashioned made with 3 y.o. Somerset cider brandy infused with toasted oak chips, and stirred with toffee apple syrup left over from the restaurant’s signature toffee apple cake, vanilla (to make the brandy taste more like a bourbon), Angostura and orange bitters and a chipotle tincture - served with an apple and chipotle tuile. Rich, appley, spicy and utterly delicious

Normally I’m not mad about cocktail dinners - too much alcohol, too much sweetness - but where the cocktails are made from ingredients produced in the same kitchen as the food and designed to go with a particular dish it just seems a seamless extension of the menu.

Jack and his colleagues chefs Matthew and Iain Pennington have a really lovely book coming out next month called The Ethicurean Cookbook where you can find most of their recipes (except the pork and the toffee apple cake - drat!) and a lot about their preserving, curing and smoking techniques. There's a really nice video which explains their philosophy on YouTube.

Blesbok loin with root vegetables, num num and 2010 Delaire Graff Botmaskop

Another week of brilliant pairings, another tough decision to make but I’m going for this combination at Delaire restaurant in Stellenbosch because it was such a great dish.

South Africans are rightly proud of their raw ingredients and this combined perfectly a colourful dish of blesbok - an indigenous antelope - with winter root vegetables, poached num num (hard to track down on Google without getting waylaid by references to the National Union of Mineworkers or alternative spellings to nom nom but a fruit belonging to the Apocynaceae family and eugenia berry pickle (a tropical plant belonging to the myrtle family). So, meaty and fruity but not oversweet.

It would have worked well, I think, with a number of reds but was perfect with the vividly, fruity 2010 Delaire Botmaskop, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc with dashes of Merlot, Petit Verdot, Shiraz and Malbec (more so than the much more expensive Lawrence Graff Reserve (which, unusually, showed better with the cheese).

The Shiraz and Malbec played their part in making the wine less austere than a classic Bordeaux blend despite the wine's comparative youth. Rhone varietals like Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre would work well too with these kind of flavours

The 2010 isn’t available in the UK yet but the 2009 is available in bond from Justerini & Brooks for £70 for a six bottle case.

Asparagus mousse, peas and oyster with Donkiesbaai Steen

I’ve been reminded during the last few days in the Cape Winelands of the great versatility of Chenin Blanc also known locally by its Afrikaans name Steen but this was the standout pairing.

It was a starter at the Rust-en-Vrede winery restaurant which was described as Asparagus Mousse, Oyster, Pea and Truffle Water, Biltong but I didn’t get much of the biltong, more the delicious fresh taste of the asparagus and peas. You can just about see from the rather blurry picture to the right that there was some shaved asparagus in there too - and the clean briney flavour of the oyster.

The wine is a comparatively new label only available on the South African market at present - a top level old vine Chenin from a coastal area called Piekenierskloof. It was the brainchild of Rust-en-Vrede’s owner Jean Engelbrecht who felt there should be more top level Chenins and sells for around 201 rand (£14.42 at the time of writing) - if you can get hold of a bottle

I wish it was available in the UK as it’s absolutely lovely - intense, crisp and citrussy - though not in an obvious way. More like a top level Sauvignon than a premium chenin like FMC. Delicious - and a top match!