Ceviche and sauvignon blanc

It’s rare that you keep on coming across a wine pairing that impresses you but my 10 days in Chile over the past couple of weeks have finally convinced me that sauvignon blanc is the perfect match for ceviche which seems to have become Chile’s national dish.

You might wonder why I hadn’t hit on it before. Well, previously I’ve found that the citrus that is generally used in the marinade tended to cancel out the flavours of the wine but in Chile I think they make it with slightly different type of fruit more like a cross between lemon and lime and also don’t use quite so much of it. Also the fish is fantastically fresh which makes seafood the top note rather than the base. (It doesn’t seem to matter much whether the fish is salmon, tuna or rockfish but their ceviche often includes raw onion another element that kicks sauvignon into touch)

Chilean sauvignon is also very fresh and sometimes saline without the powerful grassy or gooseberry character of sauvignons from countries such as New Zealand. Definitely better without oak and the younger the wine the better (so 2018 at the time of writing works just fine along with fresh 2017s)

Herring and aquavit

This week’s match of the week - herring and aquavit - was paired for me - appropriately enough - by the restaurant Aquavit which has just opened an outpost in London.

It’s not a groundbreaking match - I've recommended it before - but it was done particularly well.

I’d already been for breakfast, which I can highly recommend and had decided on the strength of that to meet up for an early dinner with a couple of food writer friends with whom I’d been on a trip to Scandinavia last year.

We’d spent a memorable evening at a totally unpronounceable herring restaurant called Bakklandet Skydsstasjon and had developed a bit of a thing about herrings.

Aquavit’s menu, which includes four different preparations - three as part of a herring selection - was the perfect opportunity to revisit our herring fetish, along with a few ice-cold shots of aquavit in beautiful little frozen glasses. I *tried* - OK I drank - two different kinds the Aalborg Dild (dill) and Aalborg Taffel (caraway), both delicious though I can’t say that one matched the herring better than the other.

It must have been along the right lines as on the menu they pair both the Matje herring (with potato, sour cream and egg yolk) and the herring selection which consists of Brantevik (dill pickled) herring and herring with mustard and curry sauces with O.P.Original which is flavoured with caraway, anise and fennel.

In Scandinavia aquavit would generally be accompanied by a glass of lager as a chaser as at this meal in Copenhagen I enjoyed a few years ago but I must confess I prefer sipping it on its own. A fun way to entertain friends in the new year.

Anchovies and Grenache Gris

Anchovies are always reputed to be difficult with food but I found a great match for them over the past few days down in Collioure and Banyuls. Which of course there should be as they’re a speciality of the area.

It was Grenache Gris, a grape that used to be used to make strong sweet wines like Banyuls in the Roussillon but which is nowadays used to make some particularly interesting strong, savoury almost oily, whites. (Oily I admit, doesn’t sound great in relation to wine but it’s a texture rather than a taste thing. Think lush and viscous.)

The anchovies are served two ways - fresh as boquerones which are cured in vinegar and salted - sometimes in the same dish but the Grenache-based Roussillon whites seem to cope with both. They were also delicious with sundried tomato paste and tapenade.

There’s a good post on how to prepare your own boquerones here.

Seared cod with red wine sauce and Premier Cru Santenay

There’s still a bit of resistance to drinking red wine with fish, let alone with a white fish like cod but last week I had the perfect dish to combine with a good red burgundy.

It was prepared for us by Gordon McDermott the head of Waitrose’s very swish new Cookery School when we went for a tasting the other day and I imagine was an easy dish to make. The cod was seared then served on a bed of wilted, shredded leeks with a red wine and butter sauce that was probably made by deglazing the pan with red wine and whisking in soft butter.

It was a perfect match both with the lovely Domaine Lucien Muzard 2008 Santenay Premier Cru La Maladière (£19.99 in 20 selected branches and Waitrose Wine Direct*) which I thought tasted of autumn raspberries and with the truly delicious 2008 Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir from Merrick’s Grove (£23.99 from only 2 branches and Waitrose Wine Direct), one of the best Aussie Pinots I’ve tasted. Great for a romantic dinner for two.

* Neither of these wines seem to be on the site yet. I'll try and find out when they're coming in.