Tandoori grouse and an Indian ‘SuperTuscan’

If you’d asked me a week ago whether I thought it was a good idea to cook grouse in a tandoor oven and then to serve it with a full-bodied red I’d have said no, and no. Which shows how you can continually be surprised by this food and wine pairing lark.

The dish was one we couldn’t resist trying at Trishna where Itamar Srulovich of Honey & Co and his wine buyer Dee and I had gone to hammer out the final details of our pop-up wine school this autumn. (Gratuitous plug. More details here)

Grouse is such an expensive delicacy it seems on the face of it mad to smother it in spices but the team at Trishna (who also own the much-fêted Gymkhana in Mayfair) know what they’re doing. In fact they have an awesome-looking game menu there that is matched with some really interesting wines.

The red - a 2010 blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet called Sette - is made by Fratelli, a collaboration between an Indian family-owned winery and Tuscan winemaker Piero Masi. I would have predicted that it would have been much too intense and full-bodied to accompany the grouse but how wrong I was. The rare meat and spices soften the tannins of the wine making it taste fabulously velvety.

Impressively Trishna pairs every dish on the menu with an accompanying wine. They recommend the 2013 Kloof Street Swartland Rouge from South African producer, Mullineux with the dish which would also be interesting.

Pasta arrabbiata with sangiovese

What happens when you choose a wine to pair with a particular dish and the dish doesn’t materialise? Well, if you’re lucky it matches equally well.

Arrriving back in Languedoc yesterday evening (a Sunday) with all the local shops shut we breathed a sigh of relief that there was at least the local pizzeria - pulling out a robust bottle of Tuscan red, Il Secondo di Pacina 2010, to go with it.

Trouble was the pizzaria’s oven had broken down so NO pizza.

Fortunately we had some pasta - as always - in the cupboard so I made a scratch supper with a very pokey tomato sauce with a LOT of garlic, bacon, passata and a spoonful of hot pimenton which I realised afterwards was pretty well identical not only to an arrabbiatta as you can see from this recipe but to the near identical pasta sauce I made a year ago. Which goes to show either that I’m a cook of limited imagination or that it’s a super-reliable match.

You could obviously also drink other sangioveses with this type of pasta or - possibly even more appropriate - a southern Italian or a Sicilian red like a negroamaro or a primitivo - but not too modern or jammy a style

Spicy tuna pasta and Tuscan red

Some of the best meals - and the best wine pairings - come about without a great deal of forethought. Like the pasta I threw together last week in France from storecupboard ingredients then accompanied with a cracking bottle of inexpensive Tuscan red we’d just bought from a winemaker at a natural wine fair. Yes, Italian wine. In France! Who’d have thought it?

I’m not mad about tuna pasta to be honest but I spiked it with a lot of garlic, some green olives and some pickled Spanish chillies which gave it quite a kick. (The base of the sauce was passata.)

Too much possibly for my wine, I thought, a rustic Sangiovese from youngish (8-10 year old) vines called Il Secondo di Pacina* but it had that wonderful light breezy elegance that Italian wines effortlessly seem to possess. And it was only 6 euros (£4.69 equivalent at the time of writing). Sssssh - don’t tell the French!

At that price we bought six bottles - wouldn’t you? - so I’ll be able to report on other good matches. Pizza seems an obvious candidate, as are other pastas with tomato-based sauces. One English retailer, Swig, no longer apparently stocking the wine, recommends sausages, pasta with meat sauces, grilled meats, wood pigeon and cheese “though it was also excellent with a humble baked potato.”

You can buy it in the UK at Gergovie Wines in Maltby Street

Their own website currently seems to be down but here's a description of the winery from their American importer Indie Wineries.

Tuscan bean soup and Sangiovese

Last week I was on an assignment in Tuscany for a couple of days. It was pretty hot but that didn’t discourage the Tuscans from serving the kind of food they enjoy all the year round - namely substantial bean and chickpea soups.

They’re particularly good because they make them from scratch from the best quality pulses which gives them a rich, sweet, mealy texture that is a quite marvellous foil for the local wines, which are almost all based on Sangiovese. Chianti is the best known of them but we tried others such as Montecucco and Morellino di Scansano. They all share the typically high acidity of inexpensive Italian reds which makes them taste slightly thin on their own by modern standards but absolutely perfect with lighter dishes such as soup and pasta.

More on this tomorrow!