Vincisgrassi and Saint-Aubin

I love a collaborative cooking project so when I stayed with my friend food writer Fiona Sims at the weekend we embarked on a vincisgrassi, an elaborate mushroom lasagne from Rachel Roddy’s fantastic book, an A-Z of Pasta. It was made famous by Franco Taruschio of the Walnut Tree but you can find Rachel’s version here. (Note the fabulous crisp edges!)

It’s an incredibly rich dish with parma ham, parmesan, porcini and cream which needs a wine with both texture and a fresh acidity to set it off.

We didn’t have anything suitable from Italy but I’d brought along a bottle of 2018 Saint-Aubin 1er Cru Les Charmes from Domaine Paul Pillot which proved absolutely perfect even though we could have easily waited another year or two to drink it. Obviously we could have substituted another white burgundy like a Puligny Montrachet or other cool climate chardonnay.

See also The Best Food Pairings with White Burgundy

Beef carpaccio and chardonnay

Beef and chardonnay doesn’t sound like an obvious combo at first glance but it depends, as always, how the beef is cooked.

This was in the form of a carpaccio at a Californian Wines tasting and lunch at Smith & Wollensky just off the Strand but the key was not so much the meat as the parmesan, truffle and truffle oil which anointed it all of which are immensely chardonnay-friendly

I tried a couple of different wines with it but particularly liked the Staglin Family’s 2019 Salus estate chardonnay which had a lovely freshness about it that counterbalanced its richness and weight. Sadly at £50 a bottle (at The Champagne Company) or £58 at Oddbins it isn’t cheap - Californian chardonnay, especially from the Napa Valley ,doesn’t tend to be - but you could pull the same trick with a full-bodied chardonnay from elsewhere - and even truffle oil rather than the real thing.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of California Wines

Meursault and black truffle crisps

Food is always a secondary consideration when you’re enjoying a really great bottle of wine but you don’t want anything to detract from it either.

So the choice by my neighbour and fellow wine buff Ruth Spivey of these Torres Spanish black truffle crisps with a very special bottle of 2008 Coche-Dury Meursault that we’d managed to persuade my pal and podcast collaborator Liam Steevenson to share with us, was inspired.

It was everything you would hope a mature Meursault would be, sumptuous, creamy, savoury, developing layers and layers of flavour in the glass. You never want to finish a wine like that - and you never forget it.

Given his generosity with the Coche I feel honour bound to mention we had a glass of Liam’s latest release, a deliciously, crisp, saline Alvarinho called Céu na Terra from Vinho Verde as a palate sharpener which would in any other circumstances have stolen the show. Especially, with seafood.

You can buy it from Red & White for £16.95. Which is a bargain compared to the £500-odd you’d pay for a bottle of Coche, if you could even get your hands on one. (And no, Liam didn’t pay anything like that!)

You can buy the crisps - and I would - for around £3.95 a 125g pack in good delis or online from Ocado for £3.49. They would also be very good with a decent bottle of Cava or vintage champagne.

Linguine carbonara and English chardonnay

Spaghetti carbonara is one of my favourite pasta recipes so it seemed a brilliant idea to alleviate the boredom of lockdown by having a ‘carbonara night’ with some friends on Zoom.

The idea arose because the same group had gone to a magnificently retro Italian restaurant after a rather boozy burgundy tasting at Avery's back in January and given we had a couple of bottles of white burgundy with us it seemed a good plan to order a carbonara.

I generally feel carbonara is better home made than in a restaurant though because it benefits from being made in small quantities and eaten straight out of the pan. It’s also well suited to Zoom cooking as you can rustle it up really quickly.

I stuck to the chardonnay theme my end but went for an English chardonnay from a quirky biodynamic producer Tillingham I’d just bought from my local natural wine bar, Kask which like many bars is operating as a wine shop at the moment.

At 10.5% it was lighter than our burgundies but with a lovely freshness that went perfectly with the rich carbonara sauce. Not the first wine you might think of pairing with a carbonara but a really good option - price aside, maybe. At £32 it’s not cheap so here are some other more affordable options

Six of the best pairings with spaghetti carbonara

Oh and linguine works just as well with a carbonara sauce as spaghetti. I'd run out of spaghetti so it was what I had available.