Cheese and Château Bouscassé Vieilles Vignes 2000

As those of you who are familiar with this site will know I’ve got issues about drinking red wine with cheese. It may seem an obvious partnership but all too often it seems a warring one.

However yesterday our cheeseboard harmonised quite beautifully with the tail end of a bottle of Château Bouscassé Vieilles Vignes Madiran 2000 from Alain Brumont which had already taken some roast guinea fowl with spicy stuffing in its stride.

The cheese was admittedly chosen to inflict minimum damage on whatever red we decided to serve. The selection included a very young fresh Pecorino, a creamy Sharpham Brie, a mellow Devon Oke (less sharp than an artisanal cheddar) and an unusually creamy Picos Blue from Spain. (Note: no stinky cheeses!)

The wine was also mature and untypical in style for Madiran - beautifully supple rather than tannic and not over-extracted as many can be. (It’s tannin that tends to interfere with cheese matches).

You can buy current vintages from Fortnum & Mason, Noel Young and Hailsham Cellars for between £18.95 (Hailsham Cellars) and £29.95 a bottle (Fortnum’s) which seems a huge discrepancy. Happily we bought ours direct from the cellar a couple of years ago about which I now feel rather smug :)

Pigeon 'tagine' with Jaboulet Ainé Hermitage La Chapelle 1994

I came across this pairing at Chris and Jeff Galvin’s newly opened Galvin La Chapelle in Spitalfields in the City where they have a vertical of vintages, some of which are available by the glass. As I observed in my review on decanter.com it’s not a cheap option but if you’ve never tasted an old vintage of Hermitage la Chapelle here’s a chance to do so.

I was slightly worried whether my glass of ‘94 would hold up against what was described as a ‘tagine’ but needn’t have worried. It was a most refined, subtly spiced version (see right) with a little ‘cigar’ of pigeon meat, a disc of couscous and a not too hot, slightly smoky harissa sauce.

It actually showed off the Hermitage better than our other dish of braised veal cheek whose sticky, unctuous sauce took the edge off the wine’s ‘sousbois’ character and subtle, almost figgy fruit.

I wouldn’t extrapolate from this to say that a less ‘cheffy’ home-made tagine was the ideal match for so grand a wine but it suggests a similar spectrum of Moroccan flavours would work with a lesser Rhône red such as a St Joseph or a Crozes-Hermitage, a Syrah blend from the Languedoc and also, I fancy, a Château Musar.

* I ate at Galvin La Chapelle as a guest of the restaurant.

Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic and Thierry Puzelat Pinot Noir

Last week’s highlight was a trip to the newly opened downstairs restaurant at Terroirs, a restaurant of which regular readers will know I’m a huge fan (along with the rest of the UK’s wine-writing fraternity).

I have to confess we ate a disgraceful amount including grilled squid with piment d’Espelette, langoustines and aioli, eggs ‘en meurette’, Middle White pork ‘rillons’ with a mustardy lentil salad and crème caramel but the highlight was a whole roast Landaise chicken cooked with 40 cloves of garlic. (No, I didn’t count them but that’s how the dish was billed. There were 30 at least, that’s for sure which sounds terrifyingly garlicky but in fact the effect is quite mild and sweet.)

To partner it we had a bottle of Thierry Puzelat PN ‘Les Montils’. Puzelat who is based in the Loire is one of the high priests of natural winemaking so this was no ordinary Loire red but funky and slightly medicinal: the kind of wine you’re not sure you really like at first sip but which grows on you as it opens up - particularly with a plateful of chicken, garlic and duck fat roasties.

To tell the truth almost any Pinot Noir would have worked with this dish but they wouldn’t have been half as thought-provoking . . .

Smoked herring roes on toast and oyster stout

I seem to be spending most of my time dining with bloggers at the moment. On Sunday it was the Blaggers Banquet, next week an Umami night at Ms Marmite Lover’s underground restaurant and last Monday Dine with Dos Hermanos a monthly (or so) feast organised by Simon Majumdar and his brother Robin.

This one was at Bentley’s an old London fish restaurant taken over recently (well, a year or so ago) by the ebullient Richard Corrigan. With both Richard and Simon having a hand in the menu it was predictably lavish with huge platters of smoked fish, followed by fish pie, braised ox cheeks (yes, as well as the fish pie) and sticky toffee pudding and clotted cream.

The smoked herring roes on toast were an unadvertised canapé but such a good one I managed to fit in three, not least because they were a fantastic match for the Porterhouse oyster stout that had been served with the oysters (a classic match) and which I still had on the table in front of me.

The consistency of soft roes is perfect for stout, I’ve realised, the slight smokey note just taking the bitterness off the edge of the beer and making it taste wonderfully smooth and velvety. Champagne couldn’t have done better.

Image © Seija - Fotolia.com