Beef shin pie and a Languedoc red

It’s amazing how many different styles of eating you can pack into a week, particularly when you’re travelling. At the moment I’m in sunny Chile stuffing myself with seafood and sauvignon blanc so I'm finding it hard to remember that just six days ago I was in rain-ravaged Britain craving pies and stews.

As next week’s match is bound to be Chilean I’ll opt for a pie. It's one one of the pairings I devised for a customer evening at Islington butcher’s Turner & George.

(Declaration of interest: co-owner Richard Turner is a mate so I agree to help them choose some wines they could sell in the shop and match them with different cuts. I get paid in meat which strikes me as an excellent arrangement.)

Richard cooked up some veal to go with a gruner veltliner, some really porky sausages with the SW6 London syrah I wrote about the other day and some pheasant we matched with a Volnay then heated up the cracking ‘Polly’s beef shin pie’ they sell to go with an organic Languedoc red - the 2011 Mas des Dames “La Dame”.

By popular vote the La Dame just inched it over the Volnay/pheasant combo. It’s a satisfyingly rich full-bodied blend of grenache, syrah and old vine carignan that is absolutely made for a pie or rich beef stew.

You can buy the wines from the Turner & George shop (I think I deserve at least another lamb chop for telling you that) or in Roberson in Kensington if you’re the other end of town.

I couldn't take a picture of the pie as I was conducting the tasting. This picture is © fkruger - Fotolia.com

Braised rabbit and Château Fond Cyprès Syrah de la Pinède

Most of this past week has been spent in Paris where almost every wine match is a good one. There’s been a lot of Beaujolais - and other Gamay - drinking and a fair amount of crisp dry whites such as Aligoté - but the pairing I’m going to pick is a Syrah I didn’t know with a stonking great plateful of braised rabbit at the legendary Baratin.

What’s clever about the cooking there is that it’s classic bistro food but with a wonderful lightness of touch. The rabbit wasn’t overwhelmed by the red wine it was cooked in merely anointed with it so you still had a sense of the delicacy of the meat. There was apparently a touch of cocoa in the sauce though I didn’t pick that up.

I was having an equally robust dish of roast pork with sauce pibil - a Mexican way of cooking with orange juice and annatto seed, as I later discovered. Again, not hot, not overly smoky, just incredibly delicious. (The chef Rachel Carena originally came from Argentina.)

We were looking for a syrah and settled on this one on the recommendation of the gaffer Philippe Pinoteau who selects the largely natural wine list. It’s a vivid, life-affirming young syrah called Syrah de la Pinède (the 2011 vintage), made on an organic estate called Château Fond Cyprès in the Corbières. One of their wines, Hope là, is imported by Naked Wines - not to universal appeal judging by the comments on the site but then natural wine isn't everybody's cup of tea. Maybe it needed decanting as Le Baratin did ours.

Syrah has a delicious savoury edge that works really well with dishes like this. It doesn’t even need to be French though almost invariably is in Paris ;-)

Steak tartare and Côteaux du Languedoc

You might be surprised to know that red wine isn’t the first pairing I think of with steak tartare, which for those of you who haven’t tried it is chopped raw beef flavoured with punchy seasonings such as capers, parsley and hot pepper sauce. I actually think it pairs really well with sparkling wine, especially Champagne but last week I was down in the Languedoc and that didn’t really seem appropriate.

My husband had ordered a dish called hachis parmentier which is a French version of shepherds' pie so we compromised on a medium bodied red in the form of the 2006 vintage of Château de la Negly’s basic wine ‘La Côte’. A blend of Carignan, Grenache and Syrah, it comes from the La Clape part of the Coteaux de Languedoc (see this more detailed description from K & L wine merchants)

It’s one of those easy-going reds that should be in everyone’s cellar, refreshing, quaffable but in no way simple or jammy. It was a great companion for both dishes, especially the steak tartare (and chips, I must confess). Almost as good as Champagne ;-)

In the UK H & H Bancroft carry the Château de la Negly range. The restaurant where we were eating is called Larcen in Agde, one of our current favourites in the area.

Mushroom 'caviar' and Californian sparkling wine

Every so often you come across a great little recipe than does wonders for almost any wine you pair with it. And so it is with mushroom ‘caviar’, a regular offering from the takeaway section of my favourite local restaurant Culinaria. Basically it’s a mushroom pâté but so reduced and wickedly intense it’s like pure essence of mushroom. Except for the perfect counterpoint - a tiny touch of tarragon.

I asked the chef, Stephen Markwick, how he made it and he said (airily, as chefs do) - “Oh, you just chop up mushrooms in a robot-coupe and cook them with butter, tarragon, crème fraîche and a squeeze of lemon” Nothing else? Well, yes, onion it transpired. And I suspect, having attempted to follow his instructions, a fair amount of olive oil which accounts for the silky spreadable texture. I’ve sent my version of the recipe off to Stephen to check against his version and as soon as I have his comments back I’ll post it on the site.

But in the meantime I can tell you that it - or any similarly mushroomy spread - is a cracking match for a quality sparkling wine like the Roederer Quartet* from the Anderson Valley in California we were drinking over the weekend which is currently on sale at Majestic for £13.33 if you buy 2 or more bottles. Or for a ripe, forward Pinot Noir. Or for a subtly oaked Chardonnay. Or a French Syrah. Or a Languedoc red. I can see I’m going to be making a lot of it this summer. If I can get the recipe . . .

* On sale in the US as Roederer Estate brut.

Image © kazoka303030 - Fotolia