Bacon cheeseburger with Pinea 17 Ribera del Duero

I’m not normally someone who craves a ‘dirty burger’ but when I was sent a couple in a meat delivery from my mate Northern Irish butcher Pete Hannan I thought I’d go the full hog with it.

It was pretty spectacular in itself - a thick patty of salt-aged Glenarm shorthorn beef which I then proceeded to load with Pitchfork cheddar (from cheesemaker friends Trethowan Brothers), crisp-fried streaky bacon (from Brown & Forrest) and some addictive deep fried onion rings from the previous weekend’s Indian cooking experiment from Roopa Gulati’s new book, India from the World Vegetarian series. Plus a brioche-style bun from my local offie, amazingly. How burger buns have moved on.

It was quite a challenge for any wine to stand up to and I would normally have gone for a new world cabernet sauvignon or Bordeaux blend but happened to have a bottle of the Pinea 17 Ribera del Duero open, an impressive wine which normally retails at £52 but is on promotion currently at winebuyers.com for £35 (still expensive, I know).

You might think it was way too serious a wine but I have previously found that expensive, structured full-bodied reds show surprisingly well with burgers. This was a modern style of Ribera del Duero, already mature for a 2017, and deliciously smooth and velvety.

For other ideas check out Six of the best pairings for a burger

Disclosure. The burgers, cheese and bacon were gifts and the wine a sample. Yes, I *know*. I know I’m lucky to be in this business and apologies if it comes across as smug or entitled 🙄

Linguine carbonara and English chardonnay

Spaghetti carbonara is one of my favourite pasta recipes so it seemed a brilliant idea to alleviate the boredom of lockdown by having a ‘carbonara night’ with some friends on Zoom.

The idea arose because the same group had gone to a magnificently retro Italian restaurant after a rather boozy burgundy tasting at Avery's back in January and given we had a couple of bottles of white burgundy with us it seemed a good plan to order a carbonara.

I generally feel carbonara is better home made than in a restaurant though because it benefits from being made in small quantities and eaten straight out of the pan. It’s also well suited to Zoom cooking as you can rustle it up really quickly.

I stuck to the chardonnay theme my end but went for an English chardonnay from a quirky biodynamic producer Tillingham I’d just bought from my local natural wine bar, Kask which like many bars is operating as a wine shop at the moment.

At 10.5% it was lighter than our burgundies but with a lovely freshness that went perfectly with the rich carbonara sauce. Not the first wine you might think of pairing with a carbonara but a really good option - price aside, maybe. At £32 it’s not cheap so here are some other more affordable options

Six of the best pairings with spaghetti carbonara

Oh and linguine works just as well with a carbonara sauce as spaghetti. I'd run out of spaghetti so it was what I had available.

Indian veggie food and sauvignon blanc

After a lively discussion about what to drink with curry on my #weekendwinematching slot it was good to discover a new angle on pairing wine with Indian food.

I was making a couple of dishes (with friends on Zoom) from Roopa Gulati’s excellent new India: The World Vegetarian which included paneer with spinach and Punjabi cauliflower with ginger. These are much lighter and fresher than the kind of heavily sauced Indian recipes you would find in the average curry house and I was thinking they might go with a dry rosé but in fact they absolutely sang with a bottle of 2018 Chateau Bauduc sauvignon blanc I had open after an online tasting earlier that day.

Makes sense when you think about it. You could have easily have added a squeeze of lemon to either dish and the refreshingly citrussy sauvignon had a similar effect.

The following night I tried three other dishes from the book - bhel puri, aubergines with a very garlicky tomato masala and a lime dal which went brilliantly well with a juicy, smashable Beaujolais that my local wine bar Kask is selling on tap which proves you can drink light dry wines with spicy food - although neither meal was that hot.

I still like aromatic wines (and beer, of course) with Indian food but it’s good to know they’re not the only option.

What wine to pair with curry: my top 5 picks

* weekendwinematching is a fortnightly live discussion on my @winematcher Twitter feed. Follow me to keep track of when the next one is!

Stir-fried pork with Thai basil and Australian riesling

This week’s match of the week doesn’t come as a big surprise but it’s sometimes good to be reminded of tried and tested pairings rather than ones that come totally out of the blue.

The dish - Pad Krapow Moo - was from Kay Plunkett-Hogge’s Baan which I can strongly recommend for first-timers to Thai cooking, the recipes being both authentic and relatively simple.

Wimpily I scaled down the bird’s eye chillies to two - along with a large red chilli - rather than Kay’s 4-6 and think it could probably have done with another one and also added a good dash of fish sauce which was suggested in the alternative version. It also included a good handful of fragrantThai basil which you can now conveniently find in Waitrose.

The riesling was a 2016 Pacha Mama riesling from the state of Victoria which wasn’t quite as limey as the ones from the Clare and Eden Valleys but still with a strong citrus character that went with both the pork and the accompanying green mango salad. Given the wine is Australian it is somewhat bizarrely named after an Inca earth goddess so they also jocularly recommend it on the back label with llama cheese and barbecued guinea pig “or, for the less adventurous, pan-seared barramundi.”

Majestic used to stock it in the UK but I can’t now find it there on-line but it is still available Down Under. Similarly citrussy rieslings would obviously work too.

For other suggestions as to what to pair with Thai food see Which Drinks Pair Best with Thai Food