Pork and beans with Pierre Gonon St-Joseph

Beans are one of the great underrated aids to matching full-bodied wines as I was reminded at the weekend when we combined a dish of pork and lima beans with a fine St-Joseph.

The beans and pork had been cooked for 6 hours together so were full of flavour and fall-apart tender, providing a wonderful backdrop to the powerful and complex wine. It was a 2006 from Pierre Gonon, at Mauves in the Ardèche. The estate is cultivated by his two sons Jean and Pierre, using only natural treatments and natural yeasts in the winery and treading the grapes by foot. There’s a good description of them here by their American importers Jolivin and here from Vine Trail who sells the wines in the UK.

The 2006 is currently available from Vine Trail for £19.95 and - rather more expensively - from Berry Brothers & Rudd who are charging £28.95 for the ’07 and ’08 vintage. If you think that’s a lot the vineyards are apparently precipitous and have to be worked entirely by hand. A cheaper Syrah would of course pair well with this type of dish too.

Gonon apparently also make a fine white St-Joseph which I haven’t yet had the opportunity to try.

Image © teleginatania - Fotolia.com

Salt cod with chorizo and Cabernet - yes, Cabernet!

Few these days dispute that red wine goes with fish - it’s just a question of which wine and how the fish is cooked. Most would accept ‘meaty' steak lookalikes like grilled or spiced tuna or salmon work with Pinot Noir but would hesitate to take it much further than that but last week I found a couple of surprisingly good fish matches at one of my favourite new wine bars 28-50.

The wine was an inexpensive 2008 Vin de Pays from Domaine Les Filles de Septembre* from the Languedoc’s Cotes de Thongue - their cuvée Dana which surprisingly turned out to be a 70/30% blend of Cabernet and Merlot. I say surprisingly because it actually tasted more like a Syrah - you could certainly pick up a violet note in it and it had a delicious suppleness to it which you don’t often find in a Cab. That’s terroir for you - although it is of course perfectly possible that it did contain a proportion of unannounced Syrah.

There were four of us and it was fine with all of our mains, two of them fishy. The most successful match was with a dish of salt cod and chorizo but it also paired unexpectedly well with a red mullet bouillabaisse, more predictably with a dish of pigs' cheeks and even survived a pissaladire. Obviously one of those useful ‘take me anywhere’ wines. You can buy it from Yapp’s for £9.50 a bottle.

*Incidentally the name of the domaine comes from the fact that all the owners four daughters were born in September!

Lager and jerk chicken

It's been one of those very rare occurances in England today - a sunny Bank Holiday - and we've spend the day with friends at the Bristol West Indian Cricket Club where they turned out not to be playing much in the way of cricket but a great deal of music, dancing and bouncy castles.

There were various food vans and stands including a jerk drum and a bar where you could buy a basic range of lagers like Budweiser. Nothing to write home about in beer terms but, you know, they made a great match for the spicy chicken and salad.

Afterwards we went to a pub owned by our friend's aunt and had yet more jerk - this time with an even punchier sauce - and with that I had a Heineken which worked equally well.

Sometimes you don't want things too complicated. It was absolutely the right drink for the food and the moment. And there's a great deal to be said for that.

Scallop and crab risotto with inexpensive French Sauvignon

I know I’ve highlighted crab as a match for a number of different wines but it really is a great dish to pick if you’re drinking a serious white. This time however the wine was far from stellar: the basic house Sauvignon at Culinaria in Bristol where I was doing a photo shoot for our next book.

The chef Stephen Markwick had made his superbly rich scallop and crab risotto which is based on a roasted crab stock, I’d shot it and was eating it for lunch (one of the perks of the job!).

His wife Judy offered a glass of wine to go with it which turned out to be a 2009 Domaine de Menard Sauvignon* from Gascony. The fascinating thing was that because Stephen had left out the squeeze of lemon at the end of the recipe (obviously not needed for the photography) the wine did that job, lifting the richness of the dish and adding a note of citrussy freshness.

You could argue that a more elegant Loire Sauvignon like Sancerre, say, might have done that even better and that may be right but the inexpensive Menard hit the spot perfectly. And I don’t think a white burgundy, my normal preferred pairing with scallops, would have topped it either.

An argument for the home cook to sometimes hold back on the seasoning and let the wine do the job.

*Actually although this was listed as a Sauvignon, Menard only seem to make a Colombard-Sauvignon blend so it may well have been that which would make sense in that part of the world. The rather nicely put advice on the website is to use it to “sublimate your fishes, shellfishes and seafoods”.