Wild boar with cherry sauce and Karam Corpus Christi

It’s almost impossible to pick out one pairing from last week’s trip to the Lebanon but if I’m forced to it has to be a dish of wild boar with cherry sauce I ate with Habib Karam the owner of Karam winery (and - extraordinarily - the airline pilot who flew us to Beirut)

Habib is as passionate about his food as he is about his wine (and I imagine every other pursuit he engages in) and had devised an amazing meal which we were supposed to have for lunch and ended up eating about 6pm due to various distractions along the way. Lebanese wine visits tend to drift . . .

The boar, which I could imagine him killing with his bare hands, turned out not to have been dispatched by him but had been marinated for two days in Syrah and cloves then brushed with brown sugar and honey, slow roasted and served with a dark, delicious, sour cherry sauce and a selection of boiled vegetables including baby aubergines. It went extraordinarily well with his 2007 Corpus Christi, a dark, plummy blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Syrah and Merlot. It was still a little young to drink but the gamey meat and sharp cherries mellowed its tannins and made for a quite stunning match.

Habib makes his wine from high altitude vineyards just outside Jezzine which is to the south of the Bekaa valley so they all had a fresh acidity that made them particularly good partners for food. Other good pairings from the dinner were his Cloud Nine 2009, a crisp blend of Semillon, Viognier, Sauvignon Blanc and Muscat with tabbouleh and Arc-en-Ciel, a Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah-based ros with lobster freekeh - a fabulous paella type dish made with lobster (flown in from Ghana), tomatoes and a touch of chilli. I found the wine a touch bubblegummy but it was terrific with the food.

Of all the winemakers I met last week he was the most focussed on food pairings. “There’s no point in trying to make wine unless it ends up on a table of food” he said, simply.

At the moment Habib doesn’t have a distributor in the UK but if you’re interested in his wines I’m sure he’d find a way of getting them to you. Flying them himself, if need be.

I visited the Lebanon as a guest of Wines of Lebanon.

Salt cod with chorizo and Cabernet - yes, Cabernet!

Few these days dispute that red wine goes with fish - it’s just a question of which wine and how the fish is cooked. Most would accept ‘meaty' steak lookalikes like grilled or spiced tuna or salmon work with Pinot Noir but would hesitate to take it much further than that but last week I found a couple of surprisingly good fish matches at one of my favourite new wine bars 28-50.

The wine was an inexpensive 2008 Vin de Pays from Domaine Les Filles de Septembre* from the Languedoc’s Cotes de Thongue - their cuvée Dana which surprisingly turned out to be a 70/30% blend of Cabernet and Merlot. I say surprisingly because it actually tasted more like a Syrah - you could certainly pick up a violet note in it and it had a delicious suppleness to it which you don’t often find in a Cab. That’s terroir for you - although it is of course perfectly possible that it did contain a proportion of unannounced Syrah.

There were four of us and it was fine with all of our mains, two of them fishy. The most successful match was with a dish of salt cod and chorizo but it also paired unexpectedly well with a red mullet bouillabaisse, more predictably with a dish of pigs' cheeks and even survived a pissaladire. Obviously one of those useful ‘take me anywhere’ wines. You can buy it from Yapp’s for £9.50 a bottle.

*Incidentally the name of the domaine comes from the fact that all the owners four daughters were born in September!

Cru classé Bordeaux and rack of lamb

Just as last week’s match of the week was a classic - so is this week’s: the main course we had at Oliver Peyton’s National Gallery Café at a dinner to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Circle of Wine Writers.

The wines were provided by the Union des Grands Crus de Bordeaux and included Lynch Bages Pauillac '96, Branaire-Ducru St-Julien ‘98 and Canon La Gaffelière St-Emilion 2001 all of which provided fascinatingly different pairings for the dish which was served medium-rare with broad bean and Jersey Royal crushed potatoes and a tomato and rosemary jus.

I personally thought the beautifully mellow, complex Lynch Bages was the best match with the relatively delicate flavours of the dish though the brighter, sweeter fruit of the La Gaffelière made an interesting counterpoint. Both it and the the Branaire-Ducru would probably have benefited from a dish with slightly more powerful seasoning though the herby note of the rosemary keyed into all three wines.

Of the other two courses I thought a dish of slightly oily hot-smoked sea trout failed to do justice to a sumptuous bottle of Chateau Latour Martillac Pessac-Léognan 2007 (a Riesling would have worked better, in my view but obviously this was a Bordeaux dinner) but the pairing of the 2002 Chateau Guiraud 2002 Sauternes with a lightly caramelised apple tarte tatin and honey clotted cream was spot on.

Image © Eventimages21 - Fotolia.com

Lamb with coriander and the Garage Wine Company's Cabernet/Carignan

This is possibly the most off-the-wall pairing I encountered on my recent Chilean trip and for that reason the most exciting - both on account of the food and the wine.

The wine is made by the small Garage Wine Company which is part of a group of independent vintners called MOVI about whom I shall be writing more in due course. It’s the 2008 vintage, numbered #18 and is a blend of Cabernet from the Upper Maipo area and some old bush vine Carignan from Maule (I was tremendously impressed by the Carignan I tasted in Chile). It was deliciously supple and aromatic with intense flavours of fresh figs and dark cherries.

The dish, for which I simply have to get the recipe, was a Peruvian dish of slow cooked lamb in a dense coriander sauce which we had at Puerto Peru, the restaurant where we did the tasting. Its herbal character set off the wine to perfection though I suspect it would also have gone well with some of the other wines we tasted especially the Cabernet Francs.

At the moment the Garage Wine Company's wines are not exported to the UK but you can contact the owner Derek J Mossman Knapp direct through their blog or via email to derekATgaragewinecoDOTcl