Hake with cream and anchovy sauce and cava

It’s a pretty safe bet that if you have a wine-based sauce that an accompanying glass of the same type of wine will pair well with it so I was confident of ordering a glass of cava to go with a hake dish cooked with a cream, cava and anchovy sauce last week.

The restaurant was Rambla, a small Catalan restaurant in Dean Street in Soho which has been attracting a lot of favourable comment lately. Weirdly the dish was billed as ‘velveted’ hake which I suppose is an accurate description of the rich opulent texture of the sauce. It didn’t look much as you can see but the flavour was amazing - if you like anchovies which I most certainly do. The accompanying morel mushrooms were an extra bonus.

The cava which was made by Mirame wasn’t an exceptional one - no reason to expect more at £6.50 a glass - but it would interesting to try the dish with one of the new high quality caves de paraje - a new classification for top quality wines from the region. They do have Gramona by the bottle if you're in the mood for something a little flashier.

It would be well worth trying something similar at home to show off a good cava - or a bottle of champagne for that matter.

Eggs, chips, truffles and Cava gran reserva

You might think egg and chips was too humdrum a dish to be paired with wine but not the way the Spanish make it.

This was one of the dishes on the table at Boca Grande in Barcelona where we were taken by top Cava producer Juvé & Camps.

It’s known in Spain as huevos rotos meaning broken eggs. The basic version (recipe here) is made with home-made chips fried in olive oil, topped with an egg - or two - which are broken over the potatoes. Sometimes serrano ham is added as well.

This was a luxury version with (I would guess) fine slices of Iberico ham fat and copious amounts of truffles and was just insanely good with the rich, full-flavoured Juve & Camps 'Gran' gran reserva which is surprisingly available from Amazon for £26.68. Honestly I wouldn’t have cared if that had been the only thing on the table.

I also really liked the highly versatile Juve & Camps rosado which is pure pinot noir - and you can really taste it. It’s not, like most rosados, a standard cava which happens to be pink but has a really gorgeous summery red berry character. We drank it the next day with a diverse selection of modern tapas and it was utterly delicious. It's again available in the UK from Amazon and various independents* and in the US from wine.com

* Baileys Delicatessen; Broadway Wine Company; Chislehurst Wines; Discover Wine UK; Duncan Murray Wines; Hortic Express; Lewis & Cooper Ltd; Milestone Wines; Noble Wines; Rosso Bianco Wines

Lobster with lichen and Torello Special Edition Cava

I went to the most extraordinary wine pairing dinner last week at Elena Arzak’s Ametsa in London, sponsored by the Consejo Regulador for Cava

Arzak, if you don’t know her, runs one of Spain’s most avant-garde restaurants in San Sebastian alongside her father and the menu was a roller-coaster ride of dishes that looked nothing like their descriptions.

There was seabass with ‘celery illusion’ for example where the celery was apparently formed from pineapple - an unlikely but delicious combination with this delicate fish. And an extraordinary dish of ‘pigeon with seeds’ (below) where the pigeon had been disconcertingly arranged on the plate to look like a shot bird lying in a pool of blood (actually a rather gorgeous chocolatey, raisiny purée). It was a powerful dish to match with cava but the weighty 2006 Recaredo brut nature reserva held its own remarkably well thanks to the accompanying seeds.

But the most harmonious match was a dish of lobster claw with swiss chard, a lacy corn wafer and a dusting (I think) of lichen. (It’s hard to keep up with exactly what’s going on in dishes like this.) That was paired with a 2010 Torello Special Edition brut reserva, an elegant creamy cava with a lively mousse and a dosage of only 4.3g. As you’d expect from lobster and fizz it was spot on.

You can buy the Torello which, as you can see, comes in a really wacky bottle from Hic for £16.50 and Great Western Wine for £17.50 - great value for a sparkling wine of this quality.

I attended the dinner as a guest of the Cava D.O.

Sparkling wine and spicy snacks

The idea of drinking sparkling wine with Indian street food might seem crazy but it’s a really good pairing as I was reminded last night when I dined at Masala Zone just off Carnaby Street with Warren Edwardes, the CEO of a company called Wine for Spice.

Edwardes sells three wines which you’d probably consider unremarkable if you tasted them on their own but which are cleverly designed to deal with the heat of spicy food. He deliberately set out to replicate the effect of a lager, still most people’s drink of choice with a curry. by creating a wine that had a refreshing spritz - less fizzy than a sparkling wine but fizzier than a still one. The wines are also modest in alcohol which means that you can swig rather than sip them.

The pairing I thought worked best was his Viceroy White, a blend of the grapes that are used to make cava (Macabbeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo) and just 11.5% We tried it with two different spicy snacks - chicken tikka served with a fresh coriander chutney and some sev puri, crisp little biscuits topped with spicy mash and fresh chutneys and scattered with what looked like deep-fried vermicelli. As usual with sparkling wines it paired really well with the crisp snack but also handled the stronger flavours of the marinated chicken and chutney well, both dishes enhancing the natural creaminess of the wine.

I also tried his Raja Rosé, a strong dry rosé, again made in Spain from Tempranillo and Garnacha with a lamb thali based on rogan josh and a hottish Goan prawn curry with his Rani Gold, a blend of the Catalan grape varieties above with 50% Muscat, quite similar to Torres Viña Esmeralda. Again, given the strength of the wines (12.5% and 11.5% respectively) they held up surprisingly well because of the spritz. (One of the reasons Edwardes - a banker in a former life - makes them semi-sparkling is because the wine attracts a lower tax rate than sparkling wines like Champagne but they also do the job of refreshing the palate without making you feel excessively bloated or gassy.)

Would I serve the wines at home? I’m not sure that I would (I’d probably go for full-strength fizz) but I’d be extremely grateful to find them in an Indian restaurant. You can apparently buy them from Ocado in the UK or contact Warren through his website wineforspice.com

Incidentally, Masala Zone is a great place to go for a quick meal if you’re in the West End. It serves genuinely authentic Indian street food at a very fair price. There are also branches in Islington and Earl's Court.