Match of the week
Cherries (and plums) with Central Otago Pinot Noir
One of the standard ways of devising a wine pairing is to pick out flavours in the wine and put them in the accompanying dish. Not too much or it can cancel out the flavour of the wine but done with skill, as it was by chef Des Smith at The Hunting Lodge, it’s pretty impressive.
The dish was an unctuous chicken parfait served with deep red cherries that had been macerated in pinot and a sliced - and I think also lightly pickled - plum. Two fruit notes that chimed in perfectly with their Central Otago pinot. (And also pretty good, it has to be said with their rather delicious Lagrein, a grape variety of which there is a tiny amount in New Zealand.)
The fact that the pairing was about the fruit not the parfait was underlined by the fact that I had a similar dish at Tantalus Estate on Waiheke the day before - this time made with duck liver and accompanied by pear and ginger which went really well with their pinot gris, which like most in New Zealand is made more in the Alsace style.
Often a successful pairing is more about the accents in the dish not the core ingredient. A smooth rich parfait flatters pretty well everything (except perhaps sauvignon blanc and other acidic whites) - it's the fruit you put with it that suggests the match.
Mini Yorkshire puddings with rare fillet of beef and Central Otago Pinot Noir
A student gathering is not the first place you’d think of finding a good wine pairing or, indeed, a drinkable wine at all but the talk I gave last week at the University of Bristol Wine Circle produced some great combinations.
The food which was prepared by recently graduated student Emma Barlow was pretty impressive too. I think most of us would feel well pleased with ourselves if we’d managed to rustle up such posh canapés as the mini Yorkshire puddings with rare fillet of beef, creamed horseradish and pea-shoots on the right.
With it we’d paired a mature 2002 Haut-Médoc, Chateau Lamothe-Bergeron which I thought a little austere though have to admit the majority of the students disagreed with me. I preferred a younger, more lively Central Otago Pinot Noir 2010, the Yealands Estate ‘Chancet Rocks’ which confimed my belief that pinot is a particularly good match for fillet steak.
The truth is that both would be fine with beef though I think the Bordeaux would drink better with a roast dinner and the pinot would be the better party wine.
Other good pairings were a Western Australia Sauvignon-Semillon called Allegory with some parmesan and rosemary shortbreads with roast cherry tomatoes, feta and black olives and a 2011 Sauvignon de Touraine with filo tartlets filled with smoked chicken, mango and coriander.
Those Bristol students know how to live . . .
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