Savigny-Les-Beaune and Chicken and Cep Pie

Finding something suitable to drink with a good red burgundy is a bit of a challenge as so many dishes are highly flavoured these days.

So - confession time - I made the rookie error of making an elaborate side dish (the herby cabbage and potato gratin) from the new Ottolenghi OTK book because I was afraid the pie which I’d ordered from the Marksman menu on Dishpatch wouldn’t be enough for three.

Had I had more confidence in the generosity of their portions and gone for the simpler accompaniment of mash and perhaps some buttered sprout tops it would have been the perfect match with the delicate, pretty Domaine Seguin-Manuel Savigny-les-Beaune ‘Godeaux’ 2018 I served with it. As it was the wine which was still quite youthful took a bit of a hammering from the herbs, garlic (2 heads of it, albeit roasted) and lemon in the gratin, a dish that probably would have been better with a sharp white, maybe even a Chablis.

You can buy the wine, which I was sent as a sample from Haynes Hanson & Clark for £29 (or £25.75 if you buy a full case) but would suggest it would benefit from a further year or two in your cellar - or wherever you store your wine.

Anyway I don’t hesitate to recommend the Marksman’s Chicken and Cep pie to you, with or without burgundy. It’s utterly delicious.

I paid for the pie. The wine was a press sample.

For other good red burgundy pairings see The Best Pairings with Red Burgundy

Mushroom risotto with spatburgunder

OK, this pairing is not rocket science - I’m sure you know that pinot noir is a great match with mushrooms and so obviously with mushroom risotto too. But you may not have totally taken on board just how good German pinot - or spätburgunder, as they call it in Germany - is nowadays.

The bottle was a half bottle of Mimus Ihringer Winklerberg spätburgunder I was sent by Iris Ellmann of The Wine Barn and was just fabulous with the most gorgeous pure, ripe but not remotely jammy fruit - quite beautifully in balance and amazingly vibrant considering it was from the 2015 vintage. (Under screwcap which was interesting). Sadly it’s not cheap at £33.65 a bottle but pinotphiles will be used to that. And it does fall into the Erste Lage classification - which is equivalent to a premier, if not a grand cru.

The risotto was one that came as part of the excellent takeaway menu I had ordered from Root in Bristol and came with a punchy chive purée which you can see I somewhat clumsily swirled into it. (Interestingly the tasting note on the wine suggests that it’s good with herbs)

I have to confess that I drank a glass of grüner veltliner I had open with a couple of the other dishes which included fried celeriac with Korean Barbecue sauce and hispi cabbage with cheese and crispy onion crumb but the spätburgunder and risotto match was definitely the highlight

You’ll be pleased to hear we’re doing a competition with Iris next month.

See also Which wines and beers pair best with mushrooms.

The wine was a sample from The Wine Barn. I paid for the takeaway.

Cherries (and plums) with Central Otago Pinot Noir

One of the standard ways of devising a wine pairing is to pick out flavours in the wine and put them in the accompanying dish. Not too much or it can cancel out the flavour of the wine but done with skill, as it was by chef Des Smith at The Hunting Lodge, it’s pretty impressive.

The dish was an unctuous chicken parfait served with deep red cherries that had been macerated in pinot and a sliced - and I think also lightly pickled - plum. Two fruit notes that chimed in perfectly with their Central Otago pinot. (And also pretty good, it has to be said with their rather delicious Lagrein, a grape variety of which there is a tiny amount in New Zealand.)

The fact that the pairing was about the fruit not the parfait was underlined by the fact that I had a similar dish at Tantalus Estate on Waiheke the day before - this time made with duck liver and accompanied by pear and ginger which went really well with their pinot gris, which like most in New Zealand is made more in the Alsace style.

Often a successful pairing is more about the accents in the dish not the core ingredient. A smooth rich parfait flatters pretty well everything (except perhaps sauvignon blanc and other acidic whites) - it's the fruit you put with it that suggests the match.

Roast partridge and Pinot Noir

I’ve already suggested pinot noir as a good pairing for partridge so it was good to find the recommendation vindicated at lunch with Carolyn Martin of Creation Wines at 67 Pall Mall last week.

We’d already tasted our way through their latest releases and I’d earmarked the partridge on the strength of their still very youthful but delicious 2016 Art of Pinot Noir. Interestingly it tasted much smoother and more mellow with the bird - a reflection of how it will round out as it ages.

I also liked the Art of Chardonnay with the dish which worked largely because there was a layer of creamed sweetcorn under the bird and some roasted squash on the side - two ingredients that pair really well with chardonnay

We also had a very interesting tasting of different herbs and flowers with the wines - Martin has done pioneering work on matching flowers and wine which forms the basis for one of the many wine and food tastings at her and her husband Jean-Claude's Hemel-en-Aarde winery. It’s prompted me to start putting down my own thoughts on matching wine and herbs which I’ll post shortly.

For other pairing options with partridge see

The best wine pairings with partridge

I ate at 67 Pall Mall as a guest of Creation Wines