Salad caprese and malagousia

One of the objectives of the organisers of our trip to Greece last week was to try to show how Greek wines pair with other international cuisines and flavours. It resulted in some quite bizarre dishes like black eye beans and kiwi fruit and chicken with carrot cream and tangerine gel but also provided some useful new insights.

One was how assyrtiko - Greece’s most popular and famous white wine - is not the only Greek wine you can pair with tomatoes. Malagousia, another crisp dry white but with a more of a floral character, works too.

It proved a really good match for a caprese-style salad with tomatoes, mozzarella and a zucchini/courgette pesto - against all my expectations, highlighting the tomato flavour. (My photo was so rubbish that this is a stock photo but the dish we tried also had ham in it.)

We actually tasted it blind as one of the rules of the trip, which was funded by the EU, was that we were not allowed to know what wines we were tasting as the focus was supposed to be on the PGIs or sub-regions but I later discovered it came from the Petriessa Estate on the island of Evia. (Seems counter-intuitive when you’re talking to the trade but there you go ...)

Malagousia also proved a good pairing with taramasalata and would also work well with classic Greek meze like hummus, tzatziki, olives and vine leaves and with spanakopita.

I participated in the trip as a guest of Wines of Central Greece. Photo by Viktor1 at shutterstock.com