Anchovies and Txakoli

What pairing can I possibly I pick from a trip to San Sebastian, the most gastronomic city in Spain, possibly even in Europe?

Well, I’m going for a simple but brilliant one: anchovies and the deliciously crisp local white wine Txakoli.

You get this combination everywhere - the locals love their anchovies and take great pride in the ones they cure themselves.

This is a pintxo from Antonio bar in which they’re wrapped round some diced, spicy guindillas and some sweeter pickled (I think) green pepper, a punchy mouthful that would defeat most wines but surprisingly not the 11.5% txakoli which sailed both through them and practically everything else we threw at it over the 36 hours we were in the city.

The bottle to the right is made by Basque family producer Txomin Extaniz which cultivates the precipitous vineyards just outside the town which form part of the denomination of Getariako Txakolina. You can buy it from Ocado, Oddbins and Cambridge Wine Merchants for £14.99 or thereabouts* which is admittedly not cheap but it’s not an easy wine to produce and worth it for something quite unique.

There's also a quirky way of serving txakoli which is poured from a great height to preserve its slight spritz as this video explains.

(*Look out for promotions and, in the case of Ocado, of those 25% off deals!)

Txakoli and practically everything on the Palomar menu

I think Txakoli may be my new favourite restaurant wine - or at least it is this summer. It’s a unique, sharp, very slightly fizzy white wine from the Basque region of Spain. The one we were drinking - at the Palomar in Soho - was the Agerra Txakoli which comes from the designated origin of Getariako

It went quite brilliantly with The Palomar’s food which I guess can best be described as modern Israeli but to which they give their own unique twist. It’s full of vivid and delicious flavours but the element that I think went best was the dairy one - dishes like the burnt courgette tzatziki, and beetroot carpaccio with burnt goat’s cheese (needless to say, fashionably singed not burnt to a cinder).

It was also great with the Kubaneh (Yemeni pot baked bread served with tahini & ‘velvet tomatoes’ a luxuriant fresh tomato dip that tasted a bit like gazpacho. Oh and the mysteriously but seductively spiced fish felafel

You can buy the Agerra for £13.95 from Whitmore and White in the Wirral, Cheshire. I also very much like the Flysch txacoli I recommended in my Guardian column this week.

Caesar salad with a Godello based Spanish white

A lot of the time when we’re eating out we’re not matching dishes exactly - we simply buy a bottle we like the sound of and hope it will cope with everything we throw at it.

That happened last week with a delicious Spanish white called Pazo de Mariñan, a blend of Godello, Teixadura and Albarino from the Monterrei region of north west Spain.

Maybe not the first bottle you would think of ordering in an Italian restaurant but you know what? It sailed through quite a tricky series of dishes including this Caesar salad which was made with fresh anchovies (boquerones) rather than salted ones and a richly-flavoured pasta dish of nduja (spicy Calabrian sausage) and mascarpone which I think might have defeated a lesser wine. You can buy it from Village Wines of Bexley in Kent for a very reasonable £8.98 a bottle.

The restaurant is one of my new favourites in Bristol, Pasta Loco, which does a brilliant set lunch for just £12.50 for two courses. Rude not to order a decent bottle of wine, then.

By the way you’ll need to book. It’s deservedly popular.

For other pairings for Caesar salad see

The best wine pairings with Caesar salad

Fideos negros con calamaritos with alioli and Rueda

I’ve never been a huge fan of Rueda, a sauvignon-style wine from the north of Spain, but seem to have been drinking it non-stop since I arrived in Malaga.

Maybe because it goes so well with the local seafood but I think they go for a fresher less pungent style here than back in the UK

This was one of the best pairings with one of my favourite dishes of the trip at Taverna Uvedoble: Fideos negros or fried squid ink noodles with baby squid and a good dollop of alioli (garlic mayo). It was SO good we went back for it a second time.

The Rueda acted with the pasta like a sharp squeeze of lemon, balancing the dark saline flavour of the noodles and the punchy alioli. A really good restaurant and a great combination