Slow-cooked salmon with a yuzu-flavoured beer

I dithered between two brilliant beer pairings at the British Guild of Beer Writers Beer Meets Food event at the Wild Beer Co, Wapping Wharf last week, both of which involved citrus.

The first was a dish of slow cooked salmon with spiced and pickled cucumber and herb crème fraîche which was served with the Wild Beer Co’s Yokai, a 4.5% beer brewed with yuzu (a Japanese citrus fruit), kelp seaweed and Sichuan peppercorns. Beer doesn’t generally exhibit acidity but this was a wonderfully refreshing counterpoint to the richness of the salmon.

The other was even more daring - a lemon tart served with chantilly cream and Sleeping Lemons sour beer which is made with salty preserved lemons. I would never have thought it would have been able to handle the sweetness of the dessert but it just piled lemon flavour on lemon in the most delicious fashion.

The only reason why I went for the salmon pairing as my match of the week is that it’s probably more to most beer drinkers' taste and easier to replicate - although you’d probably have to pick up a can of Yokai for the full effect (The Wild Beer Co sells it on their website for £2.50) Not that that's any hardship ...

You may also like to check out 10 Great Wine Pairings with Salmon

I attended the BGBW lunch as a presenter, talking about how the seasons can affect our choice of beer. (Both these strike me as really summery)

Duck casserole with Vilarnau Els Capricis Cava

There’s a certain repertoire of ingredients and dishes that are regularly paired with vintage champagnes and other sparkling wines - luxury foods like lobster, turbot, sweetbreads and even roast chicken but until last week’s trip to the Cava region I would never have thought of pairing them with a casserole

The region has a new classification for its top wines which is Cava de Paraje Calificado. Wines that qualify must meet strict requirements including that they must come from a single vineyard, from vines that are a minimum of 10 years old and must be aged on their lees for at least 36 months

The Vilarnau Else Capricis 2014 that was paired with this dish doesn’t currently have CPC status but could well get it if it is approved by the panel which is made up of independent judges as well as industry professionals.

It’s made from the local Xarel-lo grape variety and is fermented in 250 litre chestnut wood barrels giving it a really lush, rich character that is surprising in so young a wine.

Like other top cavas we tasted it’s also a Brut Nature - i.e. a sparkling wine without any added dosage (the sweet liquor with which most sparkling wines are topped up)

But duck casserole? Well, it's a local speciality and much loved in the region - Bruno Colomer Marti, the winemaker of Cordoniu also told us he liked to drink Paraje cava with a casserole. The key I think was that the dish was rich, slightly fatty and a touch sweet thanks to the prunes that were also an ingredient. (I reckon you could have added chestnuts too)

Champagne, even with dosage, would have been too dry I think. Vintage cava could and did cope.

I travelled to Penedes as a guest of DO Cava.

Mature Marlborough chardonnay with modern Japanese food

I don’t often go to wine lunches or dinners, preferring to experiment with a range of wines from more than one country and producer with the food I’m eating but I couldn’t resist the temptation of trying New Zealand producer Astrolabe’s wine with the food at Sake No Hana in London's St James's.

The restaurant describes its food as 'modern authentic Japanese'. Although the presentation is classic the flavours and saucing are bold which is maybe why the 2014 Astrolabe Province Marlborough chardonnay stood out as the surprise star of the meal.

It was outstandingly good with a dish of aubergine with roasted sesame miso sauce, a tataki of beef with sesame and egg mustard sauce, tuna with truffle and black cod with yuzu and pretty good with the tempura prawn and beef with shiitake mushrooms. The only dishes it didn't work quite so well with were a very simply prepared tuna tartare and the sushi which went better with their lighter pinot gris.

When I came to think about it afterwards I was struck by how many of the ingredients were umami-rich with miso, sesame and truffle playing a key part in the flavour of the dish - which was, of course, the element that made the chardonnay, which was barrel fermented and aged in French oak, shine.

The fact that it wasn’t the most recent vintage helped too - the wine had had almost 4 years in bottle. And was served cool rather than icy cold which tends to numb the flavours in a mature wine like this.

Astrolabe also suggests the more conventional food pairings of poultry, pork and light game, creamy seafood and pasta dishes, mushroom risotto and paella (though I’m not quite so sure about the latter!)

Hic! wine merchants still has the wine for a very reasonable £15.75 if you feel inspired to try it for yourself or £17.80 from Armit Wines.

I ate at Sake no Hana as a guest of Astrolabe.

Alta Langa spumante and pizza

Last week I was in Piemonte exploring the world of vermouth with Roberto Bava of Cocchi. I discovered many startlingly good pairings about which more about in due course but the one I was most intrigued by was their Alta Langa sparkling wine with pizza, not a combination I would have expected at all.

The pizzas, which we sampled at a pizza restaurant in Asti called cRust (no I wouldn’t have been encouraged to go there either by that name), weren’t your average pizza by any means though. The toppings were mostly fresh or very lightly cooked but what made them so especially good with sparkling wine was the incredibly light, airy crisp base, the result, apparently of a triple-fermented dough.

We tried several different toppings of which the standout combinations were the Toto Corde which is made from pinot noir and chardonnay with a napoletana-style pizza with two different kinds of tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella and a basil sauce and the gloriously fruity Rosa (made 100% from pinot noir) with a topping of gorgonzola, treviso and honey.

Frustratingly the wines, which are interestingly fermented in tank rather than in the bottle, aren’t available in the UK. I suggest someone contacts Cocchi and offers to import them ;-)

You can read more about the Alta Langa denomination here.

Other good pairings with pizza