Provençal-style fish soup and Picpoul de Pinet

We’re down in the Languedoc for a few days and ended up at one of our favourite fish restaurant Le Glacier at Marseillan.

It’s not that the cooking is amazing but the local oysters are the best I’ve eaten, the portions are generous and the prices - 25€ for the basic set menu - more than reasonable.

It’s been so incredibly cold down here I decided to go for the fish soup which came in a huge steaming tureen along with croutons, rouille (a spicy garlicky mayonnaise-type sauce) and grated cheese. I could have made a meal of that alone.

We were drinking - as we always seem to end up doing down here - the local Picpoul de Pinet, a versatile crisp dry white that seems to go with everything you throw at it. And it was perfect - the right wine for the place and the occasion.

Dark savoury French fish soups like this can take slightly stronger earthier whites and even dry rosés but what you don’t want is a wine that’s too oaky or too fruity so I’d steer clear of wines such as rich chardonnays and New Zealand-style Sauvignon Blancs.

Anchoïade and strong dry southern French rosé

Anchovies are supposed to be tricky with wine but I pretty well always find that rosé hits the spot.

Mind you, over the last few hot sunny days in the Languedoc (sorry to rub it in for those in the UK who've endured a week of grot) we've been drinking it with pretty well everything from charcuterie to pasta. But I was impressed by its ability to handle this particular anchovy paste which was very strong and fishy - almost like a patum peperium.

The wine came from our neighbour a couple of doors up the road, Domaine Belles Courbes, whose vineyards are in Saint Chinian. He makes two - one that's oak aged (elevé en fûts de chêne) which is 13.5% and a slightly lighter fruitier one that's just off-dry and which I think would work better with kormas, and other mild Indian and Chinese dishes.

They appear to be stocked in the UK by a company called Wines Unfurled but the most recent vintage they have is 2008 which is really too old for this style of wine. (The oaked version I had was 2009 and the unoaked 2010). If you're in the Languedoc you can buy them direct from the winery in St Geniès-de-Fontedit. Or buy something similar in style.

Palais Royal and Roquefort

We’ve been down in the Languedoc for the past week, revisiting some of the winemakers we haven’t seen for a while. They included Domaine de l’Arjolle, one of the first wineries we bought from when we bought a holiday home down here in the early 1990s.

Like most wineries in those days they were running the whole thing on a shoestring and the winery was pretty ramshackle. I seem to remember an old mattress being propped up against the cellar wall (maybe for some unfortunate cellar hand who was deputed to keep an eye on the tanks overnight) but nowadays they have a pukka tasting room and cellar and obviously welcome a fair number of visitors.

The owner Louis-Marie Teisserenc (right) remembered that I was interested in food and wine pairing and produced a series of impromptu snacks to partner the wines as we went along. I have to confess I couldn’t resist trying some superb foie gras sprinkled with red wine-flavoured ‘sel de vin’ which was sensationally good with their late picked - but dry - Dernier Cueillette Chardonnay 2007.*

What Teisserenc referred to as ‘black pooding’ (aka boudin noir) was a pretty good match with their oddball Zinfandel ‘Z’ de l’Arjolle though the 2008 vintage was much lighter than the luxuriant 2007 I enjoyed earlier this year (which still seems to be available in Oddbins at £16.49).

But the pairing I think worked best was which the domaine has modelled on Banyuls. It's less sweet than port which I think worked particularly well with the salty Roquefort, just adding a nice touch of macerated cherry fruit. I'm sure it would be terrific with dark chocolate too.

Frustratingly the wine only seems to be available in France and Holland but I’d give Banyuls a try as an alternative.

* This is, I have to confess, the second time I’ve eaten foie gras recently, despite my resolution to give it up a couple of years ago. I can resist it on a menu - it's just hard when someone waves it under your nose. I just wish it wasn’t so delicious.

Salt cod with chorizo and Cabernet - yes, Cabernet!

Few these days dispute that red wine goes with fish - it’s just a question of which wine and how the fish is cooked. Most would accept ‘meaty' steak lookalikes like grilled or spiced tuna or salmon work with Pinot Noir but would hesitate to take it much further than that but last week I found a couple of surprisingly good fish matches at one of my favourite new wine bars 28-50.

The wine was an inexpensive 2008 Vin de Pays from Domaine Les Filles de Septembre* from the Languedoc’s Cotes de Thongue - their cuvée Dana which surprisingly turned out to be a 70/30% blend of Cabernet and Merlot. I say surprisingly because it actually tasted more like a Syrah - you could certainly pick up a violet note in it and it had a delicious suppleness to it which you don’t often find in a Cab. That’s terroir for you - although it is of course perfectly possible that it did contain a proportion of unannounced Syrah.

There were four of us and it was fine with all of our mains, two of them fishy. The most successful match was with a dish of salt cod and chorizo but it also paired unexpectedly well with a red mullet bouillabaisse, more predictably with a dish of pigs' cheeks and even survived a pissaladire. Obviously one of those useful ‘take me anywhere’ wines. You can buy it from Yapp’s for £9.50 a bottle.

*Incidentally the name of the domaine comes from the fact that all the owners four daughters were born in September!