Tête de cochon, chou and chenin blanc

Pork and chenin blanc is a tried and tested pairing but this delicious way of serving it at Le Saint Eutrope in Clermont Ferrand the other day made the wine we were drinking - a Pineau de la Loire from Thierry Puzelat of Clos de Tue-Boeuf - really shine.

The dish consisted of thinly sliced, pressed tête de cochon or pigs head topped with a shredded cabbage salad dressed with a buttermilk dressing and toasted hazelnuts which offset the soft slightly appley flavours in the wine perfectly.

It also survived a punchier dish of pigs ear with homemade kimchi which was served warm but the kimchi wasn’t as hot as most. Also really good - do go if you’re anywhere near Clermont or en route to the south.

I can’t find the wine online in the UK (although Les Caves de Pyrène imports most of Clos de Tue-Boeuf’s wines) but according to Le Caveau in Kilkenny who stock the wine

"Pineau de la Loire is the original name of Chenin blanc, in this case, the blend is 90% Chenin and 10% Menu Pineau grown on a mix of clay, flint, sand and gravel. The vines were planted betweem 1993 and 2013. The grapes are crushed gently, the juice ferments and ages 7 months in old barrels. It is bottled unfined, unfiltered with a tiny amount of SO2. Lovely citrus and wild flowers on the nose, the palate is soft and gentle, with pear, apple and lime character."

You could of course, try the combination with another natural Loire chenin or maybe a South African old vine chenin blanc. A dry perry would also be delicious.

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.

Sweet herring and mackerel rillettes with an aromatic Greek white

Paris isn’t the obvious place you’d think of drinking Greek wine - in fact it’s a rare sighting in a city whose wine lists are almost 100% French. So when I came across one in a hip little bar called Clamato I was intrigued

I had trouble tracking it down but it’s called Efranor and appears to come from a winery called Sklavos in an appellation called Coteaux d’Alnos on the island of Cephalonia and is a blend of Moscatel, Vostyildi and Zakynthino.

I wouldn’t have actually guessed as the Moscatel character is not that obvious and it tastes really dry but with an exotic, slightly perfumed character (the French tasting note I found says bergamot) and an almost oily texture that was just perfect with the rillettes, an unusual combination of sweet herring and mackerel with a scattering of freshly grated lemon zest. There were some watercress leaves on the side which added a nice touch of bitterness.

Admittedly it slightly overwhelmed the other two dishes we ate - a tartare of mackerel and a dish of white and green asparagus with trout roe which went better with the crisper, more mineral Le Pont Bourceau Anjou blanc 2011 from Les Roches Sèches my husband was drinking (a Chenin Blanc). But eating small plates like this you obviously wouldn’t want to keep switching wines.

I reckon a Portuguese white like a young Douro white or a Vinho Verde would have gone with the rillettes too - or a Spanish Albarino or Godello.

Chilled cucumber and garlic soup and Chenin Blanc

On Saturday, as I mentioned in my blog, I was at a food and wine festival in Constantia, where we wandered round the impossibly beautiful Buitenverwachting estate sipping wine and grazing on upmarket canapés devised by a selection of the area's best local chefs. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon ....

The food was great, not least this chilled cucumber and garlic soup. which had a heck of a lot of raw garlic in it which made it so spicy I suspected it had also been spiked with chilli. (Apparently not but the South Africans certainly like their garlic - we had a white garlic soup the same evening in Cape Town which was equally ferocious.)

So, cucumber, garlic, dill, yoghurt (or sour cream, maybe). What do you drink with it?Something crisp, something cold, something dry . . . Could easily have been Sauvignon Blanc but I actually went for the Chenin Blanc that was conveniently to hand - a fresh-tasting, zesty 2013 Kloof Street Chenin from Mullineux up in the Swartland region which hit the spot perfectly.

Young unoaked South African Chenin pairs with very similar food to Sauvignon Blanc as you can see in this post: Which food to pair with South African Chenin Blanc.