Fonduta with white truffles and Barbera d’Alba

There’s only one pairing I could focus on this week given that I was in Piemonte and that is white truffles. What was the best match? Incredibly hard to say!

There were so many amazing ones - tajarin, the fine, intensely eggy pasta, carne cruda (the Piedmontese version of steak tartare) and a ‘timballo’ of autumn vegetables and truffles among them - but the one I think I’ve got to go for is the fonduta, a wonderful rich eggy fondue lavishly scattered with truffle shavings we had at Trattoria della Posta at Monforte d’Alba which I reviewed here.

I remember I picked out almost exactly the same dish six years ago when I last visited Piedmont though then we had it with one of the local white wines, a Roero Arneis - maybe because the dish also included cardoons.

It is, however, more usual for the Piedmontese to serve a young red wine with a white truffle dish, most commonly a Barbera or a Dolcetto rather than the Barolo I suggested back then. (Barolo would work equally well though they tend to save it for the main course). This time we drank a 2009 Barbera d’Alba Codamonte from Giuseppe Mascarello.

You could, of course, drink white wine with truffle dishes especially with carne cruda - with which we had a rich Gaja Chardonnay. And champagne though that’s obviously not traditional in the region.

Mushroom risotto with Barbera

I went to a Piemontese wine dinner last week at a local Italian restaurant in Bristol, Prosecco about which I’ve written before. There were some very good matches - along with a couple of off-key ones, one of which involved a faulty bottle which the wine merchant introducing the event seemed determined to disregard despite grumblings from the floor.

One of the best was a fabulous mushroom risotto which had been paired with a very attractive 2003 Barbera d’Asti Superiore ‘Tere Caude’, Ca’ del Matt. Fruity Italian reds tend to work well with mushroom risotto (Dolcetto is another example) but this was a particularly good match - a wine with great intensity and character but also enough bottle age to mellow the youthful exuberance that the winemaker - a New Zealander called Matt Thompson - had introduced to this traditional style.

It’s a useful wine that would comfortably take you right through an Italian meal - slow roast pork with fennel would be another good pairing. You can buy it from www.everywine.co.uk.

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Gnocchi with fresh tomato sauce and Barbera d'Asti

A surprisingly good pairing I came across in a local Italian restaurant on Saturday night. The (admirably light) home-made gnocchi were dressed with a fresh tomato sauce with basil which I would have thought would have been overwhelmed by the firm, well-structured 13.5% Barbera the boys had ordered with it - a Ca’ del Matt 2002. (For preference I’d have drunk a dry Italian white such as a Soave.) But it was spot on - even better than it was with my main course of slow roast pork belly.

It could be that the primary fruit flavours, which had faded, were lifted by the acidity of the tomatoes. Or it could be yet another demonstration of just how food-friendly Italian wines are. Or rather New Zealand ones. On digging a bit further I discovered that the winemaker, Matt Thompson was a Kiwi! Suppose the name was a giveaway . . .

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