Beenleigh Blue and Monbazillac

It’s not only Roquefort and Sauternes that pair well together, other sheeps cheeses and sweet wines match well too as I discovered at the Evening of Cheese event I hosted at The Butlers Arms in Sutton Coldfield on Sunday

It was a mammoth cheesefest with FOUR courses of cheese, followed by a tartiflette! The blues were Colston Basset Stilton and Beenleigh Blue, a salty, sheeps’ milk cheese from Ticklemore Cheese* in Devon which is modelled on (though paler and less veined than) a Roquefort.

The three options were a Portuguese red called Porta 6, a 2011 Domaine de Grangeneuve Monbazillac which is a Sauternes-style wine from near Bergerac just outside the Bordeaux region and a sloe gin (one of my favourite pairings for Stilton) but it was the delicate sweet Monbazillac that really shone with the Beenleigh Blue.

The other two outstanding pairings of the evening for me were a mature Montgomery cheddar with Lagunitas IPA and Stinking Bishop with Poire William (a pear-flavoured eau de vie). Stinking Bishop is washed in perry (pear cider) so that stood to reason.

* you can buy it from the Courtyard Dairy who were one of the sponsors of my cheese e-book, 101 Great Ways to Enjoy Cheese & Wine

Coffee and cardamom buns

For a long time I’ve resisted the idea of a Nespresso machine but then a friend said she had a spare to get rid of and I’ve succumbed. Why did I wait so long? No sooner does the thought enter your mind that you might like a coffee than you can gratify it. Literally in seconds.

Less easy is finding the kind of coffee pod you like and the right way to brew it - short or long. Bizarrely the machine has decided to make espressos when you press the long switch and longer coffees when you press the espresso one. Or I’ve flicked some secret switch which has muddled it up. Whatever. I’m getting there. I like (I think) the Rosabaya de Columbia and the Capriccio but there are so many colours, strengths and flavours I’m a tad confused.

So I’ve been drinking (black) coffee with everything including the banana and cardamom buns from Meera Sodha’s Fresh India (which is only £9.99 on Amazon at the time of writing) to which I’ve become mildly addicted.

Cardamom and coffee is of course a classic combination so it makes sense to drink one with the other. Obviously it goes with Swedish-style cardamom buns too.

Lobster macaroni cheese and Ruinart champagne

When I flicked through the pictures I’d taken of the wines I’d drunk over Christmas and the New Year I realised there was a LOT of champagne. Partly because I’d been given or shared some rather nice bottles but equally because champagne goes with practically everything from oysters to shepherds pie (as the novelist Jeffrey Archer famously established).

This year I drank it with the turkey (Cristal, mind you*), shedloads of smoked salmon and some very good 3 year old parmesan (some 1998 Gosset Celebris which amazingly still had some fizz in it) but the best match of all was a glass (or two) of Ruinart with the lobster mac’n’cheese I ordered on room service at the Rosewood on the annual 24 hour post Christmas break I spend with my daughter (see my blog for how this new Christmas tradition came about).

I guess most of you would instinctively reach for a red with a mac'n'cheese (Saint Emilion being a favourite) but like many cheesy dishes it’s actually better with a white, chardonnay being my normal go to. But lobster, being luxurious, somehow merits going the extra mile with a bottle of bubbly, vintage for preference.

The best wine - and other drinks - to match with macaroni cheese

Wine with lobster: 5 of the best pairings

* in part payment for judging the Louis Roederer awards, in case you think I’m made of money …

Herring and aquavit

This week’s match of the week - herring and aquavit - was paired for me - appropriately enough - by the restaurant Aquavit which has just opened an outpost in London.

It’s not a groundbreaking match - I've recommended it before - but it was done particularly well.

I’d already been for breakfast, which I can highly recommend and had decided on the strength of that to meet up for an early dinner with a couple of food writer friends with whom I’d been on a trip to Scandinavia last year.

We’d spent a memorable evening at a totally unpronounceable herring restaurant called Bakklandet Skydsstasjon and had developed a bit of a thing about herrings.

Aquavit’s menu, which includes four different preparations - three as part of a herring selection - was the perfect opportunity to revisit our herring fetish, along with a few ice-cold shots of aquavit in beautiful little frozen glasses. I *tried* - OK I drank - two different kinds the Aalborg Dild (dill) and Aalborg Taffel (caraway), both delicious though I can’t say that one matched the herring better than the other.

It must have been along the right lines as on the menu they pair both the Matje herring (with potato, sour cream and egg yolk) and the herring selection which consists of Brantevik (dill pickled) herring and herring with mustard and curry sauces with O.P.Original which is flavoured with caraway, anise and fennel.

In Scandinavia aquavit would generally be accompanied by a glass of lager as a chaser as at this meal in Copenhagen I enjoyed a few years ago but I must confess I prefer sipping it on its own. A fun way to entertain friends in the new year.