Pumpkin ravioli and sparkling albarino

Having ended up unexpectedly in hospital last week I struggled a bit to find a match of the week. Water doesn’t make the most inspiring pairing for food although it (the food in hospital) isn't by any means as bad as it used to be. So I’ll tell you about the the dish I had before I was taken ill.

It was a guest lunch at The Seahorse in Dartmouth cooked by Angela Hartnett and featured one of her wonderful silky pastas - ravioli stuffed (I vaguely recall) with pumpkin and hazelnuts and scattered with lavish amounts of parmesan.

I wouldn’t say it was the perfect match with the glass of sparkling albarino I was drinking, an ultra-dry Albarino Brut Nature, from Mar de Frades which was probably designed to go with the antipasti but it was certainly good enough. I also loved the intelligent wine list which is divided up by price.

If you want to try Angela’s food - and you should - visit one of her Cafe Muranos in London in St James’s Street and Covent Garden. Or Murano itself though that's quite a bit more expensive.

Peruvian-style scallops and Rioja rosado

I thought it was pretty brave of rioja producer Ramon Bilbao to present their wines at a cutting edge Peruvian restaurant last week. Still, everyone knows rioja goes with Spanish food so why not? You never make new wine pairing discoveries if you don’t push the envelope.

The restaurant was Lima, a modern Peruvian restaurant that is owned by the chef Virgilio Martinez who is ranked 4th in the World 50 Best List. It also has a Michelin star.

The food is not particularly spicy but full of vibrant colours and flavours - this scallop dish of raw scallops with tigers milk and passionfruit sounds like one of those nightmare combinations that shouldn’t work but was absolutely delicious.

It was paired not with a white but their top level Lalomba rosé which as it happens I’d put in my top 30 gastronomic rosés in Decanter a couple of months ago. It’s very clean, fresh and elegant without any overtly fruity flavours and suited the dish perfectly.

Other wines that showed well were the Ramon Bilbao Sauvignon Blanc from Rueda which went with a starter of quinoa with sweet potato and fresh cheese and a really fabulous Andean potato stew with seaweed. The fresh-tasting Ramon Bilbao Vinedos de Altura rioja 2014 was also perfect with a dish of suckling pig.

It can’t have been easy to make the pairings work so successfully so all credit to the chef Robert Ortiz for tailoring his food so well to the wines.

I ate at Lima as a guest of Ramon Bilbao.

Roast partridge and Pinot Noir

I’ve already suggested pinot noir as a good pairing for partridge so it was good to find the recommendation vindicated at lunch with Carolyn Martin of Creation Wines at 67 Pall Mall last week.

We’d already tasted our way through their latest releases and I’d earmarked the partridge on the strength of their still very youthful but delicious 2016 Art of Pinot Noir. Interestingly it tasted much smoother and more mellow with the bird - a reflection of how it will round out as it ages.

I also liked the Art of Chardonnay with the dish which worked largely because there was a layer of creamed sweetcorn under the bird and some roasted squash on the side - two ingredients that pair really well with chardonnay

We also had a very interesting tasting of different herbs and flowers with the wines - Martin has done pioneering work on matching flowers and wine which forms the basis for one of the many wine and food tastings at her and her husband Jean-Claude's Hemel-en-Aarde winery. It’s prompted me to start putting down my own thoughts on matching wine and herbs which I’ll post shortly.

For other pairing options with partridge see

The best wine pairings with partridge

I ate at 67 Pall Mall as a guest of Creation Wines

Anchovies and Txakoli

What pairing can I possibly I pick from a trip to San Sebastian, the most gastronomic city in Spain, possibly even in Europe?

Well, I’m going for a simple but brilliant one: anchovies and the deliciously crisp local white wine Txakoli.

You get this combination everywhere - the locals love their anchovies and take great pride in the ones they cure themselves.

This is a pintxo from Antonio bar in which they’re wrapped round some diced, spicy guindillas and some sweeter pickled (I think) green pepper, a punchy mouthful that would defeat most wines but surprisingly not the 11.5% txakoli which sailed both through them and practically everything else we threw at it over the 36 hours we were in the city.

The bottle to the right is made by Basque family producer Txomin Extaniz which cultivates the precipitous vineyards just outside the town which form part of the denomination of Getariako Txakolina. You can buy it from Ocado, Oddbins and Cambridge Wine Merchants for £14.99 or thereabouts* which is admittedly not cheap but it’s not an easy wine to produce and worth it for something quite unique.

There's also a quirky way of serving txakoli which is poured from a great height to preserve its slight spritz as this video explains.

(*Look out for promotions and, in the case of Ocado, of those 25% off deals!)