Fish stew and an oaked Valencian white wine

As those of you who follow me on instagram will know I’ve been in Valencia for the past two weeks, trying to improve my Spanish which hasn’t left a great deal of time for considered food and wine pairing but this was a great match at a restaurant called Rausell in the city centre.

The dish was called suquet de pescadores, a 'fishermens' stew' with hake (I’m guessing), clams, mussels and deliciously soft potatoes in a rich saffron-spiked broth. There was probably some tomato in there too and some very good fish stock.

As in many of the other Valencian restaurants I went to they didn’t have a local wine by the glass but very nicely opened a bottle of a rich oak-aged white called Blanc d’Enguera, a blend of chardonnay, verdil, sauvignon blanc and viognier (which they very generously topped up while only charging me for the glass which was only 4 euros anyway). Viognier generally goes with saffron so it was an excellent match.

There’s a YouTube video here (in Spanish!) if you want to have a go at making a similar dish.

The 2022 vintage I tasted doesn’t seem to be available in the UK or US (though it is in Germany if you check out wine-searcher.com but you can buy it direct from the producer’s website. 

Pear, watercress and chickpea salad and viognier

Sometimes the best insights come from having a bottle already open rather than consciously choosing what to drink with a dish. I suppose I knew that viognier would go with a salad but it was the composition of this particular salad that made the pairing work so well.

It was from Sabrina Ghayour’s brilliant new book Simply and I’d made it to accompany her beetroot and feta lattice (a pastry slice) which cannot be discounted as part of the pairing though I think it was the salad that made the match sing.

It’s really simple - as the title of the book suggests - watercress and rocket, chickpeas and ripe pears with a punchy harissa dressing and a scattering of sunflower seeds. It was the pears in particular that were lovely with the viognier - a 2019 Saint-Peyre from the Côtes de Thau down on the Languedoc coast* - but it also handled the spice in both the salad and the pie (a gloriously beetrooty, cheesy kind of sausage roll)

You can find one of Sabrina’s other recipes for yoghurt and spice roasted salmon on the site but I do urge you to get the book. I’ve already made half a dozen recipes from it and all have been easy and delicious.

*which you can buy from Ocado for £11.99

For other good viognier pairings see My favourite food pairings with viognier

Lobster and Condrieu

There were so many outstanding wines at Yapp Brothers 50th anniversary lunch that it’s tough to pick out just one but I’m going to go for this pairing of lobster with Condrieu.

I’ve mentioned that lobster works with viognier before but perhaps not given it enough prominence - or maybe never had it work quite so successfully.

Adam Handling at Frog has an unusual way of cooking lobster admittedly. It was poached (overnight I seem to hazily recall) in Wagyu beef fat which gave it a more deep savoury meaty (obviously) flavour than would normally be the case but if it had been simply grilled it would also have been a sensational match with the headily perfumed Condrieu. Which was a 2017 Coteau du Vernon, the top wine of Condrieu legend Georges Vernay which was served in magnum*: a suitably extravagant wine for such a luxury food. (Yapp also suggests quenelles by which I’m assuming the classic dish quenelles de brochet, sauce nantua - pike quenelles with crayfish sauce),

Not an everyday pairing, certainly, but a sensational special occasion one.

For my other favourite wine and lobster pairings click the link.

*standard bottles are still available from Yapp for £99 if you feel like splashing out!

I attended the lunch as a guest of Yapp Brothers.

Lobster and Condrieu

The advantage of having chefs and wine merchants as friends is that you don't really need to go to restaurants*.

Last week my chef friend Chris cooked a lobster* and my wine merchant mate Raj brought along a Condrieu to drink with it. The combination was so brilliant I can’t think why I hadn’t thought of it before (probably because there are so many other delicious things to drink with lobster)

The lobster was simply cooked and served with a homemade aioli (garlic mayonnaise). Top tip - bring a pan of water to the boil, drop the lobster in it, put a lid on the pan, switch off the heat and leave for half an hour or so. Unfortunately live lobsters taste a great deal better than pre-cooked and chilled ones.

The Condrieu was a 2014 Les Terrasses du Palat from Francois Villard, a producer I visited a couple of years ago and was just dazzling, managing to combine an seductive richness with a pure mineral edge. You can buy it by the case from Raj’s R S Wines for £40 a bottle (though I think he’s now on to the 2015) or by the individual bottle from the Oxford Wine Company.

Which is pricey, but just think what it would cost in a restaurant ....

*not that it stops me. I mean I can't eat at theirs all the time 😉