Chocolate and orange cake and Chateau Climens

I’ve always considered Sauternes is too delicate a wine to pair with chocolate unless it’s accompanied by something like passionfruit with which it chimes in but it turns out if the wine is old enough - and good enough - it can handle even a chocolate cake.

The cake - chocolate marmalade slump cake - is an old favourite from food writer Lucas Hollweg’s Good Things to Eat and in fact I discovered I’d recommended it with Tokaji 8 years ago, back in 2014! But it was the wine - an astonishingly fresh half bottle of Chateau Climens 1989 that stole the show. With orangey notes of its own you might have thought it would be eclipsed by the marmalade and orange zest in the cake or overwhelmed by the dark chocolate chocolate but it was one of those rare combinations where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The only problem is procuring a bottle that old at an affordable price. Even the 2010 is £60 a half bottle these days but if you can lay your hands on an equally old Sauternes go for it!

The best food pairings for Sauternes

Chateau d’Yquem with Gorgonzola and a pressed apple terrine

OK, I don’t expect you to have a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem to hand, let alone a 1999 or 1989 vintage but this would work with any mature or not-so-mature Sauternes or similar sweet Bordeaux

It was served at a lunch at Portland restaurant in London to launch the 2019 vintage of Yquem, which is absolutely delicious by the way. (No I don’t do this every day!)

The restaurant chose to pair it with a Gorgonzola naturale, pressed apple terrine, thyme honey and hazelnuts. They could have served it with the Gorgonzola on its own of course but the terrine just added an element that linked to the wine. (By this stage the 89 tasted more like vintage Oxford marmalade than the luscious lemon and honey flavours of the 2019.)

It’s a lovely way of serving Gorgonzola anyway. I’m a great fan of showcasing a single cheese rather than serving a huge selection, one of which is bound to clash with the wine.

The 2019 doesn’t seem to be available in store yet but you can buy a half bottle of the 2018 for £146 from Berry Bros and Rudd should you feel like splashing out.

See also The Best Food Pairings for Sauternes

I ate at Portland as a guest of Chateau d’Yquem.

Scallops with Sauternes butter and oaked white Bordeaux

One of the treats I’ve lined up during lockdown is to have a weekly takeaway from a local restaurant, both to give me a break from cooking and hopefully help keep them in business and my first was a meal from one of my favourite Bristol restaurants littlefrench.

It included one of chef-owner Freddy Bird’s signature dishes of scallops with sauternes butter which of course posed the question what the accompanying wine should be.

Sauternes, I thought, would be too much of a good thing along with my feeling that it’s better at the end than the beginning of a meal but I did have a couple of dry white Bordeaux to hand. The best match was the 2016 G de Guiraud which had developed a rich tropical fruit character which echoed the richness of the sauce (which is actually as much about the butter as the wine plus some added tarragon I put in at Freddy’s suggestion)

You can buy it for £17.50 from Palmers Wine Store in Dorset or the more recent 2019 vintage from Davy’s for £17.95 which also has the 2017 vintage in magnum. Not that there’s much point in magnums at the moment!

If you live in Bristol you can order the littlefrench at home menu from their website.

For other wine matches with scallops see also Top wine pairing with scallops

Scallop tartare and sauvignon blanc

What on earth do you do when you have a line-up of some of the best wines in the world in front of you? Do you attempt to match them or reflect more the mood, the company and the time of year? Or, given that they're indisputably the hero of the occasion, do you just go with the sort of food the kitchen does well anyway?

Venerable wine merchant Berry Bros & Rudd went for a combination of the second and third strategies - choosing for Burgundy specialist Jasper Morris’s leaving lunch a light summery starter of raw scallops with cucumber, radish and apple salad that wasn’t the obvious match for some simply thrilling white burgundies. But obviously nobody cared - it was an incredible treat to get to taste such wines.

The wine that ‘did’ hit the spot was an oak-aged 2014 Dog Point Section 94 sauvignon blanc* from Marlborough in New Zealand, very much in its prime, which absolutely sang with the scallops but would you turn your nose up at a 2004 Meursault or Montrachet? I suggest, dear reader, you would not.

The other standout combination rather than standout wines (they were all spectacular) were the two reds that were served with the cheese course of Montgomery cheddar, Tunworth and Cote Hill Blue (a blue brie from Lincolnshire) - a 2003 Vega Sicilia Unico and a 1997 Ridge Monte Bello. Great choice of cheeses - none were too strong or stinky and both reds were mellow and mature enough for their tannins not to create problems with the cheese - which can be the case with younger wines

The main course of lamb with grilled Provençal vegetables and an olive crumb worked predictably well with two grand cru Charmes Chambertins - a 2010 from Olivier Bernstein and a 2000 from Denis Bachelet and a 1999 Volnay Santenots-du-Milieu from Domaines des Comtes Lafon (in magnum)

And I should confess that we drank 2001 Chateau d’Yquem with the dessert - a lemon tart with orange carpaccio and lime (and maybe coconut) tuile

I doubt if any of us - including the Berry’s team - got a great deal of work done that afternoon ....

* which you can currently buy on special offer at £18.95 from Hennings and £19 from The Wine Society.

I ate at Berry Bros as their guest.