Indian-spiced soft-shell crab and English sparkling rosé

You might have thought English sparkling wine and in fact English wine in general was a bit delicate for Indian food but this pairing at Trishna last week was spot on.

Crab of course goes well with rosé anyway and sparkling wine is great with deep-fried food so it wasn’t a massive leap to pair the two when spices were involved especially when they were as subtle as at Trishna which has a Michelin star

The wine was one of the most elegant English rosés, Busi-Jocobsohn’s 2019 Rosé Brut which has a lowish dosage of 6.3g which counters the idea that you need wine with a touch of sweetness with spicy food.

However it is a single vineyard wine and slightly fuller and riper than the extra brut rosé of theirs I’ve tasted before which helped it stand up to the dish (and makes for more pleasurable drinking too)

You can buy it from their website busijacobsohn.com for £39 - which is good value for a sparkling rosé of that quality.

For other wine and crab pairings see The Best Wines to Pair with Crab

I ate at Trishna as a guest of Busi-Jacobsohn.

Kohlrabi with fig leaf oil and English sparkling wine

A really fascinating pairing from a wine dinner at Skye Gyngell’s restaurant, Spring in collaboration with Domaine Hugo (and their vegetable supplier Fern Verrow)

Domaine Hugo is a Wiltshire based producer - the French name refers back to the time its owner Hugo Stewart was making wine in the Languedoc as Les Clos Perdus. He and his winemaker Daniel Ham make mainly sparkling wine from classic champagne grape varieties but in a natural, low-intervention style.

The wine that was paired with this dish was a rich, almost floral, sparkling brut nature without any added dosage but ripe enough to have just a touch of honey - the element that chimed in perfectly with the fig leaf oil drizzling the plate.

it was a surprise as the dish - which was sensational - was all about the salt-baked kohlrabi and the herbs - but fig leaves have an exotic scent with which the wine chimed in perfectly. Figs and honey - it makes sense when you think about it but it was a very clever, intuitive pairing from Skye.

You can buy the wine, which is unfortunately not cheap, as it’s made in tiny quantities, from the Good Wine Shop for £54 but it is extraordinary. There are links to other stockists on the Domaine Hugo website

More wine dinners are planned at Spring so it would be worth signing up to their mailing list to be kept informed.

I attended the dinner as a guest of the restaurant

Three surprisingly good pairings for sparkling wine

Last week I had three dishes that went unexpectedly well with sparkling wine - for slightly different reasons:

The first was a food and wine pairing exercise at Denbies Vineyard Hotel in Surrey where they paired their Cubitt blanc de noirs with baguette and Marmite butter which I can strongly recommend to Marmite addicts. Why did it work? The combination of the umami in the Marmite and the toasty fizz (which came from the 2013 vintage).

Then I had the most incredible dish of macaroni cacio e pepe (a cheese and pepper sauce) with deep-fried crispy chicken wings at Wild Honey St James. This was perhaps more predictable match as deep-fried foods generally go with fizz but the cheese added an extra dimension too. The wine was another English fizz - the Westwell Estate Pelegrin Brut.

And finally - this was an exceptionally good week, wasn’t it? - a cheese course at a game dinner at the Pony & Trap in Chew Magna which was essentially a giant gougère stuffed with Baron Bigod, a British Brie-type cheese with gooseberry purée and walnuts with an Etienne Fort Crémant de Limoux from Vinetrail who supplied the wines and devised the pairings. This was really quite bold as we’d just been drinking a substantial Rhône red - the Fréderic Agneray Mitan with the main course of pigeon. It was the pastry of the gougère - also crisp and cheesy - that made the match sing.

Champagne would, of course, have worked equally well with these dishes.

I ate as a guest of Denbies Vineyard Hotel and the Pony & Trap. Wild Honey St James gave me a complimentary glass of the Westwell though I paid for the rest of the meal.

“A few glasses of wine and lots of rubbish food”

What to recommend as my match of the week in this astonishing week for British sport, and especially athletics? Well, what else but Jessica Ennis' post-event treat of “a few glasses of wine and lots of rubbish food”!

For many of us, of course, that’s the norm rather than the exception from a highly disciplined training regime - well, maybe we’re healthier than that but I doubt most of you subsist on energy bars and bananas, as Jessica reputedly does

I’ve been unable to find out exactly what JE does drink but I’m guessing as a young wine drinker it’s going to be something like Pinot Grigio, New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc or rosé - all versatile wines to accompany a spot of hard-core snacking

Or, as she used to work in Pizza Hut, maybe a glass of Sicilian red or a ripe fruity Merlot would hit the spot?

If she fancies a burger she could always crack open a bottle of classed growth claret as recommended in this feature I wrote for Decanter on fine wine and fast food: she should certainly be able to afford it after last weekend but sounds like she’d settle for something a good deal more modest than that.

So perhaps she’s just going to put her feet up in front of the telly and watch the rest of the week’s events with a large tub of popcorn and a glass of prosecco. Or, better still, celebrate with a bottle of English sparkling wine like Nyetimber or Ridgeview Cuvée Merrett (both currently on offer at Waitrose at £22.49 and £17.99 respectively). And also very good with chips ;-)

If you'd just won an Olympic gold medal how would you celebrate?