Beef carpaccio and chardonnay

Beef and chardonnay doesn’t sound like an obvious combo at first glance but it depends, as always, how the beef is cooked.

This was in the form of a carpaccio at a Californian Wines tasting and lunch at Smith & Wollensky just off the Strand but the key was not so much the meat as the parmesan, truffle and truffle oil which anointed it all of which are immensely chardonnay-friendly

I tried a couple of different wines with it but particularly liked the Staglin Family’s 2019 Salus estate chardonnay which had a lovely freshness about it that counterbalanced its richness and weight. Sadly at £50 a bottle (at The Champagne Company) or £58 at Oddbins it isn’t cheap - Californian chardonnay, especially from the Napa Valley ,doesn’t tend to be - but you could pull the same trick with a full-bodied chardonnay from elsewhere - and even truffle oil rather than the real thing.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of California Wines

Thai food and orange wine

Orange wine wouldn’t have been the first pairing I’d have turned to with Thai food but what I love about this business is that there are always opportunities to revise your opinion

It was actually the theme of a tasting organised by Donald Edwards the head sommelier at La Trompette and a past contributor to this website* who convenes a monthly get together for fellow wine professionals around a food and wine theme. (You can keep track of them via the somemondaysarebetter account on instagram)

This one which took place at Smoking Goat Shoreditch really intrigued me. There wasn’t a single wine and food combination that stood out - there were a lot of wines on the table and dishes were served in rapid succession but overall I thought the lighter wines with shorter skin contact, particularly those made from aromatic grape varieties worked best with the salads and grilled dishes and the deeper coloured wines with longer skin contact went better with the meatier dishes like the smoked brisket and long pepper laab and aged beef sirloin with smoked bone marrow and galangal relish. But orange wine certainly has the personality to stand up to the hot/sweet/sour flavours of Smoking Goat’s food.

Most intriguing wine of the tasting? A 2019 Polish roter riesling from a winery called Winnica Silesian whose site is unfortunately only available in Polish. I’m trying to track it down!

* you can read Donald’s article on orange wine here and more suggestions for orange wine pairings here

Artichokes and Trebbiano

Artichokes are a notoriously tricky match with wine but don’t have to be an insuperable one as last week’s artichoke dinner at Bocca di Lupo proved.

Chef Jacob Kenedy created an amazing menu in which artichokes appeared in all kinds of guises including an American sweet artichoke pie with which he matched a moscato. (If you can’t imagine that it was surprisingly like a pumpkin pie)

The two courses that were paired with trebbiano were a fantastic salad of shaved artichokes with parmesan, anchovy and lemon (the latter ingredients definitely contributing to the match with the 2020 Trebbiano ‘Bio’ from Cantine Tolio and a creamy artichoke risotto with lemon, parsley and parmesan with a 2015 Trebbiano d’Abruzzo from Valentini, both from the Abruzzo. Again the lemon and parmesan were key elements in the success of the pairing, rather bearing out the conclusions I came to in this earlier post.

Pairing wine and artichokes

There was also an initial wine, a crisp 2020 Capolemole Bianco from Marco Carpineti made from a grape variety called Bellone which went brilliantly with the fried artichokes and sweetbreads (an artichokey riff on fritto misto) and grilled spiedini (skewers) of artichokes and langoustines. The only dish that caused it any problems were the fried artichoke alla Giudia (fried artichokes Roman style) which made the wine taste a touch sweet - the usual problem with artichokes which Jacob miraculously avoided with everything else. But not by any means a clash.

Bocca di Lupo is at 12 Archer Street, Soho, London W1D 7BB. I ate there as a guest of the restaurant

Smoked salmon and Deanston Virgin Oak single malt whisky

There were a number of great matches with Deanston’s Virgin Oak whisky up in Scotland last week but unusually I’m going for the most conventional - a starter of (very good) smoked salmon with gravadlax and a tomato and cucumber dressing at Gleneagles hotel - on the grounds that it’s the most useful.

I don’t pair malt whisky frequently enough with smoked salmon and it really is delicious.

The whisky is a bit unusual though. It’s a 46.3% blend of younger whiskies aged, like bourbon, in new American oak casks which give it a rather delicious note of light soft brown sugar and vanilla fudge and it’s master distiller Brendan McCarron’s favourite whisky of the range

It was also used in the very delicious ice-cream that went with the final course of the dinner - a rich Valrhona chocolate dessert with banana toffee, clootie dumpling croutons (yes, really!) although that dish was paired with the more complex Deanston 18 year old which could handle the richness of the chocolate.

The wild card in terms of pairing was the macaroni cheese and chips I ordered in the distillery café at lunchtime. I asked if I could try the Virgin Oak with it and it turned out to be a cracking match. If that’s a step too far for you I reckon it would also go very well with cheddar cheese.

What foods pair best with whisky?

You can buy the Virgin Oak single malt from The Whisky Exchange for £35.25 and the 18 year old, which was voted The Whisky Exchange’s Whisky of the Year), for £63.95 currently.

I visited the distillery as a guest of Deanston and The Whisky Exchange