Octopus and albarino

Octopus is a bit of a cult ingredient on restaurant menus at the moment. I’ve already noted two good wine pairings for it - with Baga and orange wine but this weekend I found another at the Sabor pop-up Polperia at the Dartmouth Food Festival.

Chef Nieves Barragan was serving it very simply - boiled in a huge vat of boiling salted water and dressed with good olive oil and a sprinkling of pimenton - and offering a glass of Mar de Frades albarino from Rias Baixas on the side. The clean slightly saline wine was just perfect with the octopus, offsetting the richness of the oil and accentuating the spicy pimenton.

Given I’ve now shown it goes with white wine, red wine and orange or amber wine it actually turns out to be a really easy ingredient to match! I suspect it would work well with a dry rosé too.

Oxtail and oloroso

As last week was Sherry Week and I’m a MASSIVE fan my match of the week clearly had to involve sherry. But which to choose? It was hard given the number of standout pairings at the sherry dinner my local tapas bar, Bar 44 in Clifton put on but I’m going for the sherry by which I was most blown away - a limited edition of Gonzalez Byass Alfonso oloroso, one of six rare casks that are being bottled by the bodega under the name ‘Vinos Finitos’ (finite wines)

According to the immensely useful blog Sherry Notes “it would traditionally have been described as an oloroso fino because of its finesse and elegance.” The flavour was actually more like an old amontillado or palo cortado to me - really beautifully delicate and almost creamy, while exhibiting that typical oloroso richness and nuttiness.

You might have thought it wouldn't have been powerful enough to stand up to the dish of slow cooked oxtail in oloroso, salt aged sirloin and salsa verde the team at Bar 44 had paired with it but it worked incredibly well, neither detracting from or overwhelming the other.

Other favourite pairings were a Dos Palmas Fino with raw red prawns and an intense shellfish sauce and Apostoles palo cortado with a cheese course of whipped Manchego and beetroot.

If you're not into sherry already do experiment with the very good value half bottles you can find in most supermarkets. Even the normal bottling of Alfonso is only around £13-14.

For further inspiration download my e-book 101 great ways to enjoy sherry.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Bar 44.

Singaporean food and cocktails

Last week’s standout pairings were all about cocktails - first at a dinner at Avenue to celebrate the World’s 50 Best awards taking place in Singapore next year and then a meal at the newly launched Kym’s the latest restaurant from the much-fêted Andrew Wong about which more in due course.

Although I think wine can handle Asian flavours there are dishes where cocktails work better, the only problem being that they take as much work as the dishes which they’re designed to match.

I doubt if many of you could construct the Oolong cocktail that was invented by the Singaporean cocktail bar Native for example (a sake lees distillate and 4 day old oolong kombucha), never mind the utterly delicious Passionate from Miles Away from Operation Dagger. This was a weird and wonderful concoction of pandan, passionfruit mead, oxidised wine and burnt butter that was designed to go with a equally delicious dessert called My Interpretation of Kaya Toast* of pandan (which my spell check keeps on wanting to change to panda), coconut, gula, muscovado and pineapple. Still, that’s what you go to restaurants - and possibly fly to Singapore - for.

So is that even remotely useful to you? Well I think - and hope - it is in just the same way as you can be inspired by the combination of flavours in a complicated dish you have in a 50 Best restaurant, you can pick out the key ingredients in a cocktail and try them in a simpler drink back home. Cocktails handle ice cream and sorbets better than wine does for a start and are less strong than neat spirits or even liqueurs

You can buy pandan juice and flavour extract online (The French company Monin also makes a pandan syrup) and obviously passionfruit juice and syrup too though I generally prefer the latter fresh.

The key to pairing cocktails with food is to work out if you’re looking primarily for a savoury or sweet accompaniment - though cocktails usually have a touch of sweetness - and sometimes, as with the ‘nogronis’ we had at Kym’s, a touch of bitterness too.

It takes pairing to another level but if you’re feeling as creative in the home bar as you are in the kitchen it can be a lot of fun.

* a favourite Singaporean snack food made with coconut milk jam

I attended the dinner as a guest of the Singapore Tourism Board.

Pumpkin gnocchi and gewurztraminer

I’ve always thought of gewürztraminer as a bit of an inflexible wine - brilliant with spicy food. rich patés and pongy cheese but not much else. However it went brilliantly with several dishes at my local, Bellita in Bristol the other day including a classic Italian dish of pumpkin gnocchi with sage and brown butter.

It wasn’t from Alsace though which may have made a difference but part of a new range of Tasmanian wines from Aldi of all places*. It’s made by an outfit called Artisan Tasmania and costs a relatively hefty (for Aldi) £10.99 but not as much as the chardonnay and pinot noir in the same range which are £16.99.

That said it’s delicious - not as heavily scented and drier than its Alsace counterparts (it’s 13.5%) but a lovely aromatic counterpoint to the rich, slightly sweet pumpkin sauce. It was also very good with a dish of heritage carrots with goats yoghurt and harissa so I guess that’s the sweet/spicy element it loves working again.

Anyway it’s a wine worth looking out for when it becomes available (online only, curiously) on October 1st.

For other wine matches with gnocchi see The best kind of wine to pair with gnocchi

*Just to clarify it isn't on the Bellita wine list just a sample owner Kate Hawkings - also a wine writer - had been sent to try by the supermarket. And even if she could put it on her list she wouldn't. All her wines are made by female winemakers!