Sauternes and rhubarb

This may sound an unlikely combination but bear with me.

We went round for dinner with friends on Saturday night and they generously dug out a half bottle of Chateau Suduiraut 1996 to drink with a rhubarb sponge and cream. That might sound quite a challenging pairing for an old Sauternes - and in truth the combination would probably have been better still if the wine had been a shade younger - but the pudding was quite light and, more importantly, the acidity of the rhubarb kept the sweetness of the topping in check making sure it didn't steal the wine's thunder.

The cream also helped as it does with sweet wines and sharp fruit - I can imagine rhubarb and panna cotta also working well.

As that lovely pale pink rhubarb is in peak season now I recommend the combination to you*. Other sweet Bordeaux or New World late harvest Sauvignon like Concha y Toro's Late Harvest Sauvignon would be a less expensive option.

The only thing that might throw it is if you cook the rhubarb with a fair amount of orange. In which case a late harvest Muscat might fare better.

Raspberry cranachan and Black Tokyo Horizon

As it turned out the star pairing of my bizarre Brewdog Burns night was not the haggis spring rolls and Punk IPA but an equally off the wall pairing of raspberry cranachan and Black Tokyo Horizon, a 15% Imperial stout.

Fresh raspberries and dark beer might sound an unlikely combination, particularly one of 15% but in fact there was so much whipped cream and the beer, which was brewed in collaboration with Danish brewers Mikkeller and Norway’s Nøgne ø was so smooth and sweet it went an absolute treat.

Other good matches included Cullen Skink with Alice Porter (6.2%), a comparatively normal brew. (It was a designed to go with a barley wine called Bitch Please which I found way too sweet. Unsurprisingly as it includes Scottish toffee and shortbread)

The sweetness of the Brewdog Hardcore IPA (9%) also worked really well with Dunsyre Blue, a mellow Scottish blue cheese and I loved the TNP float a shot of 33% Tactical Nuclear Penguin Imperial Stout with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

In general the Brewdog beers seem to be getting progressively sweeter which I feel makes them harder to match with food. Hello My Name is Ingrid (yes, that’s a beer) an 8.2% IPA made from candied malt was again far too sweet for its destined pairing of sashimi though I can imagine it being great with pork belly. Not that I imagine Brewdog are overly concerned about the niceties of food and beer pairing.

Fun evening, though.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Brewdog

Strong ale and haggis

This week’s match is a predictive one rather than one I’ve recently experienced as I’ve been invited to a Burn’s Night dinner tomorrow night by the quirky Brewdog brewery and don’t yet know what the outcome will be.

But my bet is that their beers will be a good match, a view endorsed by an experiment carried out by Scottish producer McSweens who explored a number of options with a group of drink writers.

Apparently Belgian beers fared best which doesn’t surprise me as they not only have the strength to deal with the powerfully gamey flavours of haggis but - unusually for beer - the acidity. Apparently the best pairings were Duvel, Brugge Tripel and Chimay Blue. Two dark beers, Orkney Dark Island and Skull Splitter, did well too.

Rose Murray Brown in the Scotsman yesterday recommended Innis & Gunn which I’ve also enjoyed with steak and game. And apparently Harviestoun has released a beer called Harviestoun Haggis Hunter which is available at branches of Wetherspoon’s, though at 4.3% ABV that’s quite a bit lighter.

I have a feeling that gueuze would also work well but maybe more so with haggis on its own rather than haggis with gravy. If you can contemplate haggis without gravy. Or contemplate gueuze for that matter.

Pork, chilli, coconut and gapi salad with Momo Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc

I’ve been tasting a lot of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc this week but was also reminded how well it goes with Asian food at Peter Gordon’s new restaurant Kopapa.

I ordered a glass of the Momo Sauvignon Blanc on their wine list and found it sailed effortlessly through the tapas-style dishes, especially a bite-sized, Thai-ish Pork chilli coconut and gapi salad with roasted shallots. (Gapi is the pungent Thai shrimp paste so this was quite a challenging dish.) It also survived the surprisingly delicious chickpea battered lambs brains with tomato masala my companion bravely ordered and - more to be expected - some grilled chermoula marinated tiger prawns with watermelon pickle

Momo, I discover, is made by Seresin which is now an organic and biodynamic producer though they only claim organic status for this range. It’s also fermented with wild yeasts which gives the wine a much less aggressively herbaceous character than some cheaper Sauvignon Blancs (though, as I’ve learnt this week, that is exactly what draws so many of its fans to it).

You can buy it in the UK from Harper Wells for £10.75 a bottle (£10.50 if you buy six), a good price for a wine of this quality. AG Wines stocks it for £11.25.

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