Blesbok loin with root vegetables, num num and 2010 Delaire Graff Botmaskop

Another week of brilliant pairings, another tough decision to make but I’m going for this combination at Delaire restaurant in Stellenbosch because it was such a great dish.

South Africans are rightly proud of their raw ingredients and this combined perfectly a colourful dish of blesbok - an indigenous antelope - with winter root vegetables, poached num num (hard to track down on Google without getting waylaid by references to the National Union of Mineworkers or alternative spellings to nom nom but a fruit belonging to the Apocynaceae family and eugenia berry pickle (a tropical plant belonging to the myrtle family). So, meaty and fruity but not oversweet.

It would have worked well, I think, with a number of reds but was perfect with the vividly, fruity 2010 Delaire Botmaskop, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc with dashes of Merlot, Petit Verdot, Shiraz and Malbec (more so than the much more expensive Lawrence Graff Reserve (which, unusually, showed better with the cheese).

The Shiraz and Malbec played their part in making the wine less austere than a classic Bordeaux blend despite the wine's comparative youth. Rhone varietals like Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre would work well too with these kind of flavours

The 2010 isn’t available in the UK yet but the 2009 is available in bond from Justerini & Brooks for £70 for a six bottle case.

Plaice with clams, girolles and mash with FMC Chenin

I only have to look at how many of my matches of the week involve fish to realise that it now appeals to me more than meat. Not that I’m anti-meat by any means it’s just that the sort of wine you pair with it is fairly predictable, well-trodden ground.

Piscine pairings are much more intriguing - this week’s match being a case in point. A clever, complex dish of grilled plaice, clams, girolles, celery and mash (right) which was served at a wine dinner at Medlar in Chelsea which featured Ken Forrester’s FMC Chenin from Stellenbosch.

White wine and fish - what’s unusual about that, you might ask? The wine, that’s what. With 6.1g of residual sugar it’s not really a dry white yet with an lively acidity it’s doesn’t taste medium dry or ‘demi-sec’ either - particularly not the most recent 2009 vintage. It’s just incredibly lush - like a great white burgundy or rich dry white Bordeaux.

The ingredient that the chefs had cleverly included in the dish which made the pairing was some buttery mash which keyed in beautifully to all that richness and left the citrussy notes to chime with the seafood. The girolles and the crisp fried onions also helped. I don’t think it would have worked with older vintages such as the 2007 which would be better suited to spicy dishes like butter chicken, Thai-spiced scallops or rich pâtés and foie gras.

I’d heard good things about Medlar which were borne out by this dinner. Well worth the detour to this end of town.

I ate at Medlar as a guest of Enotria who import the FMC and other Ken Forrester wines.

Semillon and seafood

This week I’m on a wine trip in South Africa (so posting may be slightly more spasmodic). There have been many great matches already but two interesting ones have involved Semillon a grape the country is beginning to handle very impressively.

We had two at our first lunch which was at Terroir on the Kleine Zalze estate in Stellenbosch: a 2006 Stellenzicht Semillon Reserve and a 2003 Boekenhoutskloof Semillon.

The Stellenzicht which was made in quite a rich style, not dissimilar from those from the Barossa Valley but with a greener edge and a crisper acidity was fantastic with an Asian-style dish of raw beef fillet with spicy ponzu sauce while the more opulent Boekenhoutskloof which had more of a white Graves feel about it proved the perfect match for a main course of poached Kingklip (a local South African fish) with prawns and a white wine sauce (right)

It reminds one what an underrated wine Semillon is.

I am in South Africa as a guest of Wines of South Africa.

Slow-roast lamb with garlic and rosemary and Rustenberg John X Merriman 2005

My first Match of the Week of the New Year is a classic but none the worse for that: an award-winning South African Bordeaux blend with a slow roast leg of lamb flavoured with garlic and rosemary.

Both the meat and the wine were bargains, picked up on special offer. The lamb, which would have easily fed six but which we managed to demolish between five of us, was on promotion at Somerfield for £5 a kilo, costing us just over £8.

The wine, a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc and Malbec, grown in Stellenbosch and aged for 20 months in oak, normally sells at £10.44 from Waitrose Wine Direct but I bought it a couple of months ago when they were knocking 20% off their whole range.

Even at the full price it's a bargain, though owing to the screwcap, I suspect, its gloriously lush berry fruit didn't reveal itself until the bottle had been open for a couple of days (inexplicably we didn't finish it off when we opened it but were glad, in the event, that we hadn't). The back label says it will repay maturation for 10-15 years (2015 to 2020) which sounds realistic to me. But if you want to drink it before then I'd decant it - when first opened the tannins were still a bit chunky.

It shows that even in these hard times life is full of little luxuries.

* There's a nice story behind the wine, btw. The wine was named after a former prime minister of South Africa who bought the estate in 1892 when the country's vineyards had been ravaged by phylloxera.