Roast beetroot salad and a juicy Aussie grenache

I nearly saved this Aussie grenache for my wine of the week it was so good but it made a great match with this beetroot salad too

As you will see it wasn’t the only thing on the plate - there was a scotch egg and slaw as well, picked up from a lovely small cafe and takeaway called Soulshine in Bridport where we were staying.

It was the beetroot salad though which was the key to the match. It was, if I remember right, roast beetroot, quinoa and purple sprouting broccoli and just a brilliant pairing with this vibrant Aussie grenache blend* called Tabula Rasa V18R made by a couple of Masters of Wine called Wild and Wilder.

It’s packaged, craft beer style, in a 50cl crown cap bottle and despite coming from the 2018 harvest is still wonderfully bright and juicy. We found it in a wine shop called Morrish & Banham but it’s widely available online for £9-10 a bottle from - among others - Noble Green and Solent Cellar though some shops are currently out of stock. We piled straight in but you could chill it slightly. Perfect for barbecues too.

*Grenache, Shiraz, Mataro (Mourvèdre) and Carignan

For other beetroot pairings see The best wines to pair with beetroot

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

Beetroot and goat cheese macarons with a pet nat rosé

In a week of pretty amazing wine pairings (it’s not every day you get to taste five different vintages of Harlan Estate* over dinner) there was one really interesting match I wouldn’t have predicted - and that’s what this weekly slot is all about.

It was at a new(ish) restaurant called Osip in Bruton I’ll be writing about shortly and was with one of the initial snacks of the set price menu: beetroot and goat cheese macarons. Not having a particularly sweet tooth I’m not generally big fan of macarons but these were satisfyingly savoury with a really good beetroot flavour which chimed in perfectly with the Les Quatre Pétillant rosé brut nature we’d ordered as an aperitif.

Although it’s made from southern grapes - grenache, syrah and carignan - it’s produced in the Loire and is available from Uncharted Wines for £18.89. I particularly like the explanation on the label: “The Les Quatre philosophy is to make the best wines possible with a style they like to call ‘Paris Wine Bar’. We take that to mean totally drinkable, accessible and fun, all whilst being brilliantly made.”

That’s totally true.

See also The best wines to pair with beetroot

* It only didn't make Match of the Week because it was paired, fairly conventionally with a fillet steak!

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.