Vitello tonnato and Etna Bianco

It’s not often you find a wine that sails through every dish you put in front of it but I’d say on the basis of Friday night’s Italian feast at Wild Artichokes in Kingsbridge that the Tenuta Tasca Buonora Etna Bianco 2017 would see you through almost any Italian meal.

The ‘feast’ - and it is indeed a feast - that Jane Baxter puts on during the Dartmouth Food festival is one of my favourite meals of the year - full of utterly delicious dishes you never come across in the average Italian restaurant. In addition to the vitello tonnato (veal with a tuna sauce) which was served with a cabbage and fennel salad, it also went brilliantly with a whole lot of other antipasti including trout in carpionne (a sweet-sour pickled dish) two kinds of sformato (flan), squid, a mussel and prawn black cavatelli, an incredibly moreish pasta dish of casarecci with sardines and with the main course of rabbit and artichokes too.

The wine which was wonderfully clean and linear - and only 12% - is made from carricante - you can find it for £19.47 a bottle from tannic.co.uk and £19,99 from allaboutwine.co.uk. Not cheap but fair enough, Etna is a touigh terrain to cultivate. And it really is delicious.

For other wine matches with vitello tonnato see The best wine pairings with vitello tonnato

Milk fed lamb and aged Vega Sicilia

One of the questions I get asked most often is what to drink with a treasured bottle and this week’s match of the week provides the answer it it’s a red.

It won’t be to everyone’s taste but it’s the baby or milk fed lamb much beloved of inhabitants of the Ribera del Duero region in the north of Spain.

I feel slightly embarrassed to admit this but I had it twice in one day last week - with venerable vintages of Vega Sicilia ‘Unico’ - at lunchtime with the 1996, then in the evening with the 1981 and the 1991 and have to admit it was sublime.

Why does it work so well? Well, the flavour of the meat, as you might imagine is delicate and sweet and it’s served on the rare side on its own with just the cooking juices. No heavy charring, no sauce, no gravy. No competing ingredients on the plate - though in the first instance it was served with the classic side salad of lettuce tomato and onion - the raw onion is possibly a bit brutal.

You may well feel uncomfortable about eating lamb at that age (21 days in the case of the evening meal) but you could take the idea and serve a similar wine with rosé veal or older lamb cooked the same sort of way. For some reason aged Ribera - and rioja for that matter - does go particularly well with lamb.

And if you're vegetarian and have read this far? I'm thinking a whole roast celeriac would be a good option.

Needless to say I was a guest of Vega Sicilia.

Pappardelle with beef shin and Barolo

It’s not often that I choose from a menu based on the wine I’m drinking but then I don’t often drink wines good enough to justify that - in restaurants at least where mark-ups tend to make the best wines unaffordable.

However my friend, wine merchant Raj Soni of R S Wines, had brought along such a good bottle to the newly opened Bianchis in Bristol - a magnum of Cavallotto Barolo Riserva Bricco Boschis Vigna San Giuseppe 2004 - that it would have been rude not to do it justice.

I actually chose a main course that had been cooked in another wine - a pasta dish of beef shin ragu braised in Chianti which proved to be the perfect match, intense enough to show off the opulent, silky Barolo but not to overwhelm it.

The conventional wisdom is that you should drink the same type of wine you use to cook a dish but this pairing proves that doesn’t have to be the case.

Three surprisingly good pairings for sparkling wine

Last week I had three dishes that went unexpectedly well with sparkling wine - for slightly different reasons:

The first was a food and wine pairing exercise at Denbies Vineyard Hotel in Surrey where they paired their Cubitt blanc de noirs with baguette and Marmite butter which I can strongly recommend to Marmite addicts. Why did it work? The combination of the umami in the Marmite and the toasty fizz (which came from the 2013 vintage).

Then I had the most incredible dish of macaroni cacio e pepe (a cheese and pepper sauce) with deep-fried crispy chicken wings at Wild Honey St James. This was perhaps more predictable match as deep-fried foods generally go with fizz but the cheese added an extra dimension too. The wine was another English fizz - the Westwell Estate Pelegrin Brut.

And finally - this was an exceptionally good week, wasn’t it? - a cheese course at a game dinner at the Pony & Trap in Chew Magna which was essentially a giant gougère stuffed with Baron Bigod, a British Brie-type cheese with gooseberry purée and walnuts with an Etienne Fort Crémant de Limoux from Vinetrail who supplied the wines and devised the pairings. This was really quite bold as we’d just been drinking a substantial Rhône red - the Fréderic Agneray Mitan with the main course of pigeon. It was the pastry of the gougère - also crisp and cheesy - that made the match sing.

Champagne would, of course, have worked equally well with these dishes.

I ate as a guest of Denbies Vineyard Hotel and the Pony & Trap. Wild Honey St James gave me a complimentary glass of the Westwell though I paid for the rest of the meal.