Smoked duck and blood orange salad with Chilean Gewürztraminer

Gewürztraminer is a tricky wine to match, one that one usually falls back on recommending with oriental food, so it’s always good to come across something that’s outside the Asian register.

This was a salad I rustled up last night based on a smoked duck breast I was given to try by the Somerset smokery Brown & Forrest when I visited the other day. I immediately thought of partnering it with seasonal blood oranges and watercress but as the latter was sold out at my local greengrocer, I ended up using a bag of mixed bitter salad leaves including radicchio and chicory.

But it was the dressing that made the pairing. Having divided one orange into peeled segments I squeezed the juice of half another orange (about 2 tbsp, I’d guess) and whisked in about 2 tsp red wine vinegar, 1 tbsp of sunflower oil and 3 tbsp of olive oil (I didn’t want the olive oil flavour to be too dominant) But what made it was the seasoning - a scant teaspoon of pink peppercorns crushed with a little Maldon sea salt and I think it was that that linked so well to the wine.

That was a 2010 Chilean Gewürztraminer from Torres Santa Digna range which was apparently Fairtrade certified this year although they don’t use the logo on the bottle. It was less aromatic than most Alsace Gewürz with less of those pungent rose petal and lychee aromas that are so typical of this variety but enough to make it distinctively aromatic. A nice refreshing wine for people who generally find Gewürz too full on.

You can apparently buy it for about £7.99 from Charles Steevenson, Denhoffer Wines, Experience Wines, Partridges of Sloane St, Sandhams Wine Merchants, Telford Wines and other independent wine merchants - one way you might do your bit for Fairtrade fortnight which starts today.

Incidentally I tried the salad with an Australian Riesling and Pinot Noir I happened to have open and neither was as good. The Gewürztraminer really stole the show.

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