Champagne and pigs tails

Champagne, we all know, goes with practically everything but PIG TAILS? Surely not.

Well yes, if they’re in the capable hands of chef Rob Roy Cameron of Gazelle in Mayfair who hammers them out into fine crispy shards and partners them with Jerusalem artichokes (another champagne-loving ingredient) and a Manhattan jus. Fried things, as I’ve said before, go exceptionally well with bubbles - in fact I’m hard pushed to think of a still wine that would have partnered this clever dish better.

Two other matches among the small plates we sampled stood out with the champagne - (a rich, Benoit Lahaye Brut Nature): a dish of mushrooms with pine nuts and wild garlic (well, mushrooms flatter everything) and another umami-rich dish of squid with sandalwood cured jowl and girolles (yes, more mushrooms but the dish was more about the pork)

The pairing was the more surprising given that the restaurant heavily features cocktails devised by leading mixologist and co-owner Tony Conigliaro so I was expecting to drink them through the meal too but the negroni I ordered, while delicious, was just a bit too strong and sweet for the delicate flavours of the food.

We did however try one of the cocktail pairings in the bar upstairs: a Serafin (tequila, pear shrub, pear liqueur and ginger beer) which was perfect with a delicate crisp corn tostada and a champagne cocktail - the Twinkle, I think - with Grapefruit Goldy (whatever that is), citrus and champagne with what looked like an ice-cream wafer, but turned out to be frozen yeast and taste like frozen parmesan. (Cameron used to work for El Bulli.) Quite gorgeous.

I guess the champagne would have gone pretty well with that too.

I ate at Gazelle as a guest of the restaurant.

Toulouse sausage and prawn dumplings with sweet chilli sauce and Thierry Puzelat gamay

A pretty wild combination this week at a lovely wine bar, Magnum, we went to in Toulouse on Saturday night. The owner Jérôme’s wife, who originally came from Réunion, had made Chinese-style dumplings with the local Toulouse sausage and prawns served with a sweet chili sauce. Not the kind of thing I would normally go for but he sold it so persuasively we had to give it a go and it was fantastic.

What on earth would work with that? Surely a white? Well turned out to be a red as it happened - an 11% gamay called Vin Rouge from natural wine producer Thierry Puzelat which was labelled a vin de France. It was fresh, it was light, it had no discernible tannins but plenty of flavour. It showed off all the flavours of the dumplings without losing its own. It also went equally improbably well with another excellent dish of potato pancakes topped with lumpfish roe served with a lemon cream sauce.

I’d forgotten how good gamay was with Chinese and Chinese-inspired food - a useful tip to remember for the Chinese new year next week.

Pork chops and perry

Sometimes you forget the most obvious food matches like the pairing of pork and perry we enjoyed over the weekend.

I cooked some pork chops with a dish of roast onions, apple, fennel and potatoes and served it with black pudding and cabbage. A quickly flung together family dinner but none the worse for that.

I would normally have used - and drunk - cider but what I had to hand was a bottle of 2009 Priggles Herefordshire perry from Dragon Orchard made from Blakeney Red pears. It was medium dry which I think worked better with pork than a totally dry perry would have done - and 7% which obviously helped to carry the other flavours on the plate. Simple, homely and delicious.

Good to know that Herefordshire now has a PGI (protected geographical indication) for its perry.

Cozido and Cortello

We went to a Portuguese evening at a local cafe, Tart in Bristol last week, which does a monthly supper club. The food was great, especially a main course of cozido, a substantial, saffron-laced stew of chicken, pork, chorizo and beans that would have actually made a meal in itself.

With it we drank a Portuguese red of great personality called Cortello, a well-priced blend of Aragonez and Castelao, which comes from the Lisbon region. It was quite light but had plenty of structure to stand up to the stew. Interestingly I thought it went better than a fuller-bodied Dao of the same vintage. Saffron seems to have the effect of accentuating wood in a wine.

The wines were provided by a new Bristol wine merchant Grape & Grind run by Darren Willis who used to work at London wine merchant Philglas & Swiggott. It has a really interesting range.