Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic and Thierry Puzelat Pinot Noir

Last week’s highlight was a trip to the newly opened downstairs restaurant at Terroirs, a restaurant of which regular readers will know I’m a huge fan (along with the rest of the UK’s wine-writing fraternity).

I have to confess we ate a disgraceful amount including grilled squid with piment d’Espelette, langoustines and aioli, eggs ‘en meurette’, Middle White pork ‘rillons’ with a mustardy lentil salad and crème caramel but the highlight was a whole roast Landaise chicken cooked with 40 cloves of garlic. (No, I didn’t count them but that’s how the dish was billed. There were 30 at least, that’s for sure which sounds terrifyingly garlicky but in fact the effect is quite mild and sweet.)

To partner it we had a bottle of Thierry Puzelat PN ‘Les Montils’. Puzelat who is based in the Loire is one of the high priests of natural winemaking so this was no ordinary Loire red but funky and slightly medicinal: the kind of wine you’re not sure you really like at first sip but which grows on you as it opens up - particularly with a plateful of chicken, garlic and duck fat roasties.

To tell the truth almost any Pinot Noir would have worked with this dish but they wouldn’t have been half as thought-provoking . . .

Charcuterie and young Syrah

Last week I had lunch at my new favourite London hangout, the wine bar Terroirs which is run by a partnership including the quirky and original Caves de Pyrène. It's a place that you'll absolutely love if you're a Francophile: it feels just like a Parisien wine bar - without the surly service. The food is also cracking but as we'd resolved to kick off the new year by splitting a Vacherin Mont d'Or, as you can read on my cheese blog The Cheeselover, we didn't get a chance this time to sample chef Ed Wilson's robust bistro food.

Our meal kicked off with some really fabulous charcuterie - some of the best I've had in London, which we washed down with a bottle of Vin de Pays de L'Ardèche 2007, a vibrant young Syrah from Hervé Souhaut of Domaine Romaneaux-Destezet that was exactly right with the silky, sweet fat of the Lardo di Colonnato and some fine prosciutto and salami from Cinta Senesi.

Like many of the other producers that Caves de Pyrène handles, Souhaut is a natural winemaker who uses only organic and biodynamic winemaking techniques - his wines are widely available in the US and elsewhere if you check out his site

Surprisingly, as I have a strong preference for crisp dry whites with Vacherin, it also went with the cheese, mainly I think because of its own crisp acidity and lack of intrusive tannins.

It was one of Douglas Wregg's ('Caves' web maestro and restaurant advisor) favourite wines of 2008.