Napoleon ewes cheese and mature white Saint Mont

It’s always a bit of thrill to come across a cheese you don’t know especially when you’re bowled over by it as in the case of the Napoleon ewes milk cheese I tasted at the Plaimont pop-up wine bar in Marciac, in south-west France last week. (It's the one at the top of the board in the picture above.)

According to the encycopaedic La Fromagerie, which stocks it occasionally, it’s a unique pasteurised cheese from the Hautes-Pyrenées “in the style of other Pyrénées ewe's milk tommes (such as Ossau) but with a softer texture and a lovely nutty tang.”

It was really sublime with Plaimont's 2015 Le Faite Blanc Saint Mont, made, like their other wines, from the relatively obscure grape varieties of Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Petit Courbu. It’s richly textured and savoury, slightly salty, even which works well with sheep cheese and handled the pungency of the Napoleon really well.

Corney & Barrow has the 2014 vintage for £20.95 a bottle but you could enjoy the same experience with an older vintage of the more modestly priced Les Vignes Retrouvées, the 2017 vintage of which is available from The Wine Society for £8.95 (though ideally I’d hang on to it for at least a couple of years to enjoy it with cheese,)

I visited Marciac as a guest of Plaimont.

Mezze and pomegranate juice

If you find yourself in an Iranian restaurant (or a Persian one as they often still describe themselves) you’ll be lucky to find much in the way of wine options and in many ways the food is better suited to the cordials or sharbats they would generally drink.

So when I visited Kuch in Bristol the other day I ordered a pomegranate juice which went really well with my plate of mezze which included felafel, kibbeh, sambosak and beetroot borani (a yoghurty beetroot dip)

Like most cordials it was slightly too sweet so if you’re making it at home I’d recommend adding some fresh pomegranate juice or maybe even a dash of lime juice but it’s much better suited to Persian food than the more common English options of apple and orange juice.

It works in Lebanese and other middle-eastern restaurants too.

Chargrilled baby lamb, salad and Rueda

If you think of lamb you almost certainly think of red wine but in a white wine producing region like Rueda white is the normal go to.

Of course at this time of year it’s not likely to be slowly cooked or richly sauced but cooked on an open grill as it was in a fantastic family restaurant called Mesón de Pedro in the village of Matapozuelos just south of Valladolid.

One of the reasons the combination with white wine - in this case verdejo - works is that they use extremely tender milk-fed lamb (normal for this part of the world, sorry), salt it generously and serve it pink, bordering on rare.

The other is that the standard accompaniment is a crunchy salad of lettuce, tomato and sweet white onion which picks up on the fresh acidity of the wine.

Also there’s more than one type of Rueda not just the fresh, citrussy, sauvignon blanc-like styles you may be used to. The ones that are made from the indigenous verdejo, aged on their lees and which have a year or two’s bottle age - i.e. the more premium wines - work best.

Here are some other wine pairings for lamb you might enjoy

I travelled to the region as a guest of the Rueda DO.

Chardonnay and charred aubergine with coriander chutney

When I think of coriander I rarely think of chardonnay - more like a sauvignon blanc or a riesling - but the tasting sponsored by Wine Australia at Imbibe the other week before last really surprised me.

The event pitted Master Sommelier Clément Robert against Master of Wine Sam Caporn each of whom chose an Aussie wine to go with one of three dishes prepared by Roger Jones of The Harrow at Little Bedwyn.

Admittedly aubergine is quite a rich, savoury vegetable but it was the pungent Indian style coriander chutney that really made Sam’s match with the 2016 Petaluma Piccadilly Valley chardonnay from the Adelaide Hills sing.

Why did it work so well? I think because of the maturity, quality and luscious creaminess of the chardonnay (the current vintage costs £27.80 from Corking Wines), the fact that the dish was cold and that there was a good dollop of yoghurt on the side. (Dairy often assists a wine match particularly with chardonnay.) The slight nuttiness and smokiness of the aubergine also helped but it wouldn't necessarily be the easiest pairing to pull off at home if you didn't have Roger there to cook it for you.

It is worth trying oaked chardonnay with Indian food if you're in a restaurant though. It goes particularly well with creamy curries such kormas and butter chicken

See also The best food to match with chardonnay