Toulouse sausage and prawn dumplings with sweet chilli sauce and Thierry Puzelat gamay

A pretty wild combination this week at a lovely wine bar, Magnum, we went to in Toulouse on Saturday night. The owner Jérôme’s wife, who originally came from Réunion, had made Chinese-style dumplings with the local Toulouse sausage and prawns served with a sweet chili sauce. Not the kind of thing I would normally go for but he sold it so persuasively we had to give it a go and it was fantastic.

What on earth would work with that? Surely a white? Well turned out to be a red as it happened - an 11% gamay called Vin Rouge from natural wine producer Thierry Puzelat which was labelled a vin de France. It was fresh, it was light, it had no discernible tannins but plenty of flavour. It showed off all the flavours of the dumplings without losing its own. It also went equally improbably well with another excellent dish of potato pancakes topped with lumpfish roe served with a lemon cream sauce.

I’d forgotten how good gamay was with Chinese and Chinese-inspired food - a useful tip to remember for the Chinese new year next week.

Grosset off-dry riesling with a Chinese New Year’s Eve feast

We had a great feast with friends on Saturday night to celebrate the Chinese New Year, cooking a range of dishes from Fuchsia Dunlop’s fabulous Every Grain of Rice about which I was raving last week.

They included fiery fish-fragrant aubergines (right), beef with cumin (unusual for China), pungent dried shrimp with cabbage and a wonderfully quirky dish called ‘smacked cucumber’ which contained Sichuan pepper and chilli oil. A challenge for any wine.

I had high hopes of Jeffrey Grosset’s 2010 Off-Dry Watervale Riesling from the Clare Valley region of South Australia but couldn’t have imagined how well it would work.

It was superbly balanced with that trademark Clare Valley lime character but managed to be light (only 11.5%) and powerful at the same time and intensely flavoured enough to stand up to all the punchy flavours in the food.

In fact it was so dry I was amazed to find it contains 16g/litre of residual sugar according to Grosset's UK importer Liberty Wines. (The acidity is 9g per litre).

On the strength of that bottle I ordered six more (from Rannoch & Scott who still seem to have a few left at the time of writing as does slurp.co.uk and Australian Wines Online.

If you can find it, grab it. It’s among the best Aussie rieslings I’ve tasted, including Grosset’s own Polish Hill. The 2012 vintage, now called Alea*, is supposed to be even better.

* Possibly the 'off-dry' description may have created the wrong impression - don't let that put you off though.

A Viognier-dominated Languedoc white and a Chinese/Thai takeaway

The first thing we do when we get back from France is to eat some kind of spicy food. It’s not impossible to eat ethnic down in the Languedoc (there are a couple of Vietnamese restaurants locally) but it’s not good.

This time we were staying overnight with friends who also have a house down there so they ordered in a takeway and put a full-bodied Languedoc white on the table - no 7 from Domaine la Croix Belle - the ‘7’ representing the seven grapes in the blend - Viognier, Chardonnay, Grenache Blanc, Sauvignon, Carignan Blanc, Muscat à petit grains and Chasan.

It’s one of my favourite local Languedoc whites but I wouldn’t have thought that spicy food was its natural register. But it was surprisingly good, especially with a Thai red curry and a spicy dish of noodles. The aromatic character of the wine isn’t immediately obvious when you taste it on its own but really came to the fore in the pairing.

It would be worth trying similar Languedoc whites that include Viognier with this style of food, provided it’s not too searingly hot.