John Dory poached in red wine with Daniel Rion Nuits-St-Georges

It was hard to pick just one pairing from the stellar meal I had at Marcus Wareing in London last week but this combination of robustly cooked John Dory and 2005 Nuits-St-Georges from Domaine Daniel Rion was the most interesting, underlining that red wine can be just as good a partner for white fish as for meatier fish like tuna.

The dish also contained other elements that made it more red-wine friendly: two different kinds of mushrooms - scarlet elf cap mushrooms and new season morels - and smoked bacon and the fish skin was very crisp.

The wine, which was still tasting very youthful, provided an elegant contrast and fresh note of acidity to the rich-tasting dish.

The other standout pairings were a 2007 Alban Viognier from California with a starter of seared Scottish scallops, chard, celeriac, sorrel, and lemon curd (a combination that tasted much less bizarre than it sounds - the lemon curd merely provided a zesty lemon top note) and a stunning 2007 Umathum Scheurebe Trockenbeerenauslese from Austria with a dessert of Granny Smith apple crème, spiced brioche crisps, popcorn and salted caramel ice cream

I’ll be reviewing the restaurant shortly.

Grüner Veltliner and salt cod

I came across this unlikely combination while I was flying back from Argentina with the Brazilian airline TAM* who have this year decided to inaugurate a Brazilian menu in business class devised by a woman chef called Ana Luisa Trajano. And quite right too.

They’ve also introduced some unusual wines on the flight including a Grüner Veltliner from Kamptal from Weingut Brundlmayer which I found went surprisingly well with a cooked ‘tartare’ of salt cod topped with a layer of lightly spiced tomato confit. The unoaked Sauvignon-based white Bordeaux on the list - Château de Rougerie - would probably have worked pretty well too.

The Grüner struggled with the main course - tilapia in coconut milk with canjiquinha (a corn-based recipe a bit like polenta) and plaintain purée, a delicious dish but one never designed to go with wine. I guess an oaked Chardonnay would have worked pretty well, maybe a Viognier but a beer would have coped better with the sweetness of the plantain. Maybe a Belgian style blonde ale or strong lager such as Duvel.

Grüner Veltliner owes its cult status at the moment to the fact that it is so wonderfully flexible with food so don’t let this put you off. I’d drink it with almost any lightly spiced south-east Asian dish with great pleasure.

* I can recommend TAM so long as you don’t mind the fact that one of the film channels is entirely dedicated to Leonardo di Caprio movies and the unnerving fact that the route map indicates that you will be landing in Amsterdam. They’re punctual though which is more than you can say for Ryanair.

Tarte au citron with Helmut Lang Beerenauslese Chardonnay

Citrus flavours are difficult to match with wine, as I’ve mentioned before, but a classic lemon tart with its combination of sharpness and sweetness is particularly tricky. The better a tart is the more it will tend to strip the flavour out of any accompanying wine, so much so that it’s almost worth serving a shop-bought one (of which there are some very good examples) if you have a serious dessert wine to show off.

The other day though, I came across an excellent pairing which was a 2006 Helmut Lang Beerenauslese Chardonnay from Austria which Tanners sells for the very reasonable price of £9.90 a half bottle (a bargain for a sweet wine of this quality).

The reason it worked so well was that it was exceptionally liquorous, coating the palate so that the sharpness of the lemon balanced but didn’t dominate. It would also be a fantastic wine to have in your cellar for Christmas drinking which I suppose we need to start thinking about soon.

Heavens - how fast it comes round!

Sea bass carpaccio and Grüner Veltliner

The other day we went to Il Vino d’Enrico Bernardo, an innovative new restaurant in Paris run by the world’s best sommelier in 2004 which has just won a Michelin star. The unusual aspect is that there is a wine rather than a food menu. You choose what you want to drink and they create a dish or a menu around it.

I’ll be writing about the experience in the July issue of Decanter but in the meantime I’ve picked out one pairing which I found particularly striking for my match of the week which was a carpaccio of sea bass, seasoned with lemon peel and with a few lightly dressed leaves piled on top. it was served with a sensationally good wine, a young (2006) but very rich, opulent waxy Grüner Veltliner Honivogl Smaragd from Franz Hirtzberger, a wine I would have thought was too assertive and characterful for such a light dish but which matched it perfectly. A real treat.

Hirtzberger's wines are stocked in the UK by Noel Young Wines though they unfortunately don't appear to have this particular wine at the time of writing.