Wagyu beef sliders and Lanson Extra Age champagne

Steak isn’t the first ingredient you might think of pairing with champagne but if it’s ground wagyu beef, served in a bun with a quality glass of fizz in a glitzy Park Lane restaurant you might just have to force yourself.

Of course it may just have been the feelgood factor that made the marriage work. The restaurant was Wolfgang Puck’s Cut and the sliders one of his signature dishes (served as an amuse rather than a starter or main).

The champagne was also a bit out of the ordinary - an extra-rich bottling Lanson created for the restaurant trade which is blended from older vintages from grand-cru and premier cru vineyards - so in effect a vintage champagne but not from a specific year. There was definitely an umami thing going on with the beef, the cheese and the fizz.

It also went really well with a warm lobster club sandwich reinforcing my conviction which I wrote about a couple of months ago that you should drink great wines with fun food.

Although the Extra Age is mainly focussed at the trade it’s currently on offer in a gift box at Ocado for £44.99, £44.49 if you buy 2 bottles from drinksdirect.co.uk or £51.95 from champagnedirect.co.uk - not at all a bad price for a wine of this quality.

I ate (and obviously drank) at the restaurant as a guest of Lanson

Grey mullet, fennel and muscadet

This isn’t the first time I’ve made muscadet my match of the week but it’s a wine that’s great value, constantly improving in quality and unbelievably versatile with food.

This time it was a sure fire hit at a restaurant called Le Servan I’ll be reviewing shortly with a lovely dish of raw grey mullet with sorrel cream. fennel and a touch of fresh coriander. The dryness of the wine chimed in perfectly with the raw fish and slight sourness of the sorrel, not detracting in any way from the clean, sharp flavours.

The wine was a Clos les Montys 2013 from Domaine de la Chauvinière which was only 11%, I seem to remember, and selling for just 4€ a glass. It proves yet again you don’t have to have a wine with a high level of alcohol to carry flavour.

Interestingly the producer’s website suggests that it’s a good wine for laying down but then I have had interesting encounters with aged muscadet before (see here and here).

I reckon we’ll be seeing more of Muscadet on wine lists in 2015.

Duck and waffle and saison beer

Unusually this week’s match is speculative - an imagined pairing rather than an actual one.

It’s the signature dish of the Duck & Waffle which occupies a dramatic site on the 40th floor of the Heron Tower with spectacular views over the City of London. We were there for breakfast and it went perfectly well with the black Americano coffee I’d ordered but as it’s available at other times I was wondering what I’d drink if I’d ordered it at 2am (the restaurant is open round the clock).

The dish is an intriguing mixture of sweet and salty. A spicy confit duck leg on a waffle, topped with an egg with mustard-spiked maple syrup poured over the top. Outrageously good though I struggled to think of a wine that would match. Tokaji might though I think a dessert wine would overdo the sweetness.

My friend Sig suggested bourbon which would certainly work flavour-wise but might be a touch too strong. A Manhattan maybe …

Then I had a chat on Twitter with the chef Dan Doherty and we decided that what it needed was a beer - a rich strong saison for preference. You could probably also get away with a blonde ale or even a strong golden ale like Duvel. Or maybe Deus, a Belgian Tripel brewed with champagne yeast. In fact once you start thinking about beer there seem limitless possibilities. You could even drink a breakfast beer - if the Duck & Waffle had one. (I’m hoping this post will encourage them to enlarge their beer list!)

If you’re not able to get to the Duck and Waffle you can find the recipe in Dan’s recently published book of the same name.

Scallop and mango ceviche with Montes Cherub Syrah Rosé

Given Chile’s proximity to the coast, this week’s match couldn’t be anything but seafood but I’m going to pass over the more obvious pairings with sauvignon blanc in favour of this wildly brilliant combination of scallops and rosé.

It was served on the last night of our trip last week overlooking the vineyard where the syrah grapes were grown in the Colchagua valley (how cool is that?) It’s a strong (13.6%) dark rosé which gives an impression of sweetness but tastes much drier with food.

I didn’t expect it to work with the citrus in the ceviche but the fresh mango and chilli in the marinade make it a stunning match.

Other pairings Montes recommends are sushi (especially more innovative sushi such as that served by Sushi Samba, I’d venture), salmon with mushroom sauce, paella and “shrimp scampi” pasta, cannelloni and lasagne. I reckon it would also be good with barbecued chicken and pork.

(Infuriatingly having written all this I’ve discovered that the most recent vintages of Cherub Syrah are not available in the UK but a) I couldn't resist the label b) loved the pairing c) haven't got time to rewrite the post and d) it's well-distributed in the States (see wine-searcher.com) so at least some of my readers will be happy

Other strong fruity syrah rosés will obviously work too...