Artichoke barigoule and grüner veltliner

So maybe Austria’s signature grape grüner veltliner is the perfect pairing for tricky-to-match artichokes?

I’ve suggested it as a good option before in this post on matching wine and artichokes and last week’s experience of trying the two together at Bristol restaurant No Man’s Grace has confirmed my view.

The occasion was the fourth dinner in a series organised by local cookbook club Eat Your Words where Bristol chefs cook a menu from one of their favourite cookbooks. John Watson of No Man’s Grace was ambitiously tackling The French Laundry Cookbook and opted to serve the very French barigoule - a dish of braised artichokes with onions, carrots and fennel - with a crisp 2014 Austrian grüner veltliner from Hopler (available at James Nicholson) which really stood up to it surprisingly well.

The restaurant is also noted for its desserts and served two as part of the dinner: a strawberry shortbread with a 2011 I Capetelli, a late harvest Garganega from Soave producer Anselmi (winedirect.co.uk) and a divinely light lemon sabayon pine nut tart with honeyed mascarpone with a 2013 Late Harvest Tokaji Katinka from Patricius (Hic wine merchants). Both were great matches but I actually preferred the fresher, sharper Capetelli with the tart.

Hot smoked salmon, Korean carrots and pinot gris

This is one of those serendipitous pairings you sometimes stumble across when you rustle up a scratch meal and pair it with an open bottle in the fridge.

The hot smoked salmon came from the Co-op, the carrots from a recipe in Olia Hercules marvellous Mamushka which was my book of the month last month and the wine, a G Stepp Pinot Gris 3 from the Pfalz from a selection I was sent by Naked Wines, which is £11.49 to ‘Angels’ (i.e. regular Naked Wines subscribers) £16.99 to the rest of us.

That may frustrate those of you who, like me, aren’t Angels (I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how long it takes me to get to the top of the waiting list. I'm 6105 at the moment) but there are other dry - or dry-ish - pinot gris on the market that would do the job equally well. (New Zealand, as you can see from this post a few months back, is another excellent source.)

The Korean carrots are more like a pickle than a salad so more salty than hot. Well worth making if you have the book.

What this match underlines is that pinot gris (aka grauburgunder) works as well with smoke and pickled flavours as it does with spice, making it a really useful companion for south-east Asian, Scandi and central European food

Mature Savennières with chargrilled carrots, burnt aubergine, miso and walnut pesto

OK, this pairing at Jason Atherton’s new Social Wine and Tapas isn’t exactly easy to reproduce at home but it was certainly the highlight of my food and wine matches last week.

The dish was a clever and complicated one from the vegetable section of the tapas menu (defining tapas pretty loosely, admittedly) and one of the best vegetarian dishes I’ve had in London. There were powerful smoky notes from the charred carrot and aubergine, a rich umami taste from the miso and a generous dollop of nutty pesto - quite a lot for any wine to contend with.

It was paired on the advice of the sommelier Stefan with a flight of Savennières which he’d been instrumental in putting together because one of the wines - a 1992 Roche aux Moines from Domaine aux Moines - was his birth year (gah!). It was somewhat less youthful than Stefan but hugely interesting to try. The wine of the flight that worked best was the gorgeously honeyed, peachy 2011 Les Genets from Domaine Laureau with great acidity which held its own magnificently with the different elements of the dish.

The wine flights are definitely the way to go at Social Wine & Tapas. They offer you a chance to try some really interesting wines - served in appropriate glasses or stemware. My Savennières flight was £21 which is not cheap for 225ml of wine,, but I didn’t want to drink more than that and a bottle of the Genet would have cost £35. You can buy the wines to take away, if you like them, in the small retail shop on the ground floor.

German spätlese riesling and rare venison

One of the most interesting things I noticed on my trip to Germany last week was how Germans drink riesling with red meat. I wouldn’t have thought it would work but was utterly convinced by this pairing of super-tender rare venison with an exotic spätlese (late picked) riesling.

The dish was devised by the chef at Zum Krug who obviously has extensive experience of matching food and riesling and was interesting not just for the venison but the way he handled it - topping it with a herby crust and accompanying it with buttery cabbage (in spätburgunder butter), honeyed carrots, which played on the sweetness of the wine, and a delicious potato and walnut terrine which emphasised its nutty notes.

The wine was an off-dry 2006er Oestricher Lenchen Riesling Spätlese from Weingut P.J. Kühn in Oestrich, an impressive producer we had visited the previous day in the Rheingau and was full of exotic fruit flavours.

Just one of those serendipitous wine matches where everything fell perfectly into place.