23 year old Chablis and crispy chicken wings

There were a couple of contenders for match of the week this week. I particularly enjoyed a gin and tonic with my king prawn coconut curry for a start but I’m going for this pairing as it’s always tricky to know what to drink with an very old wine.

The bottle in question was a 1999 La Forêt premier cru Chablis from Domaine Dauvissat-Camus which had developed a rich, almost caramelly flavour though still with a fresh acidity that cut through our starter of salt baked celeriac and confit of chicken wings (basically boned out, crisped up wings). There was some black garlic and pickled wild garlic stems in the dish but it was the umami taste of the shards of crispy chicken skin that did the trick.

The dish was at Rhubarb at Drapers Hall in Shrewsbury and the wine was generously shared by James Tanner of Tanners wine merchants round the corner where I had been doing a food and wine tasting. (The prawns with sweet chilli sauce and Barry & Sons Clare Valley riesling and belly pork with apple purée with Domaine Bruno Sorg pinot gris from Alsace were particularly good matches there!)

For other good pairings with Chablis click here

I ate at Rhubarb as a guest of Tanners Wines

Coq au vin and Moulin-a-Vent

I’ve always loved those huge jars of cooked meals you can buy in France so was pretty excited when I was sent a jar of coq au vin, or rather Coq au Moulin-à-Vent by Chateau du Moulin-à-Vent the other day.

The dish was cooked by chef Frédéric Menager* who runs a restaurant in Burgundy called La Ferme de la Ruchotte and raises his own chickens.

Coq au vin is basically a Burgundian dish, made traditionally with Chambertin but Beaujolais, especially a serious Beaujolais like Chateau du Moulin-à-Vent’s, works equally well. Interestingly the Chateau had given him the 2000 vintage to cook it with, his preference being for older wines to give the dish added complexity. In fact the dish was not obviously ‘winey’ just deeply flavoured.

They also sent two different cuvées to pair with it, both 2018s, the Champ de Cour and the Les Vérillats. The Champ de Cour, the more savoury of the two, worked best I thought though the Vérillats was delicious too and both were great with the Vacherin cheese we had afterwards.

Unfortunately they’re not inexpensive. The Champ de Cour costs £204 for a case of six bottles from the Fine Wine Company and Stannary Wine apparently stocks the Vérillats but I can’t find it on their website.

*hilariously translated in the English version of the website as Fred Household

See also Four favourite wine matches for coq au vin

Roast chicken and ‘Saison’ cider

Even though we might enjoy a glass of cider down the pub it’s not often, I suspect, we open a bottle for friends but given the number of interesting ciders around and the fact they’re bottled in full-size sharing bottles we really should.

I took along this bottle of Find & Foster’s Saison Pomme which is made in the rich saison beer style out of Devon apples when I heard my mate Kate was cooking roast chicken and it went perfectly.

Find & Foster specialise in making ciders from ‘forgotten’ orchards and in a natural wine style. The name Saison, they explain, “refers to the seasonal farmhouse ale brewed by farmers to quench the thirst of their workers during the harvest. Historically iit underwent a long slow fermentation fuelled by yeasts that were native to the farm.”

This version too is made with wild yeasts and unfiltered which gave it a slightly cloudy appearance and preserves its deep apple flavour.

It would be great with roast or grilled pork or a good cheddar too.

You can buy it for £9.40 from Native Vine, £9.95 from wineandgreene.com and £12.95 from Hop, Burns & Black though at some of these it appears to be temporarily out of stock.

See also 8 great wine (and other) matches for roast chicken

The photo above isn't of Kate’s chicken as we were eating outside by candlelight and it was too dark to get a shot!

Vietnamese chicken salad and ginger and lemongrass cordial

One of the encouraging things going on in restaurants now is the increasing number of interesting alcohol-free drinks on offer which I find particularly welcome at lunchtime when I don’t particularly want to drink.

Last week’s visit to Noya’s Kitchen in Bath is a case in point. It’s a really lovely little Vietnamese cafe owned and run by a chef who started doing pop-ups and offers a short, regularly changing menu of seasonal dishes. On an unusually warm spring day last week she had a totally delicious Vietnamese chicken salad on offer with which I drank her homemade ginger and lemongrass cordial, topped up with sparkling water and garnished with mint.

Unlike wine or other drinks which have their own character it’s possible to tailor-make your soft drink offering to the kind of food you serve and the cordial was perfectly gauged for the food.

The following day I had a pickled lemon martini at Jikoni, an Indian restaurant in Marylebone, London with a series of small plates - more proof that not drinking doesn’t have to be dreary.