Le Petit Aioli and Bandol Rosé

A classic pairing this week but beautifully executed.

Petit aioli is a scaled down version of le grand aioli, a Provencal dish of cooked vegetables and usually eggs and/or fish served with a super-garlicky mayonnaise.

In this case, at the Sessions Arts Club in London's Clerkenwell, it included soft boiled eggs, anchovies, broccoli, chicory, some kind of Italian (I think) greens and pink fir potatoes with a gorgeous great gob of golden aioli

We took advantage of the fact that there was a Bandol rosé - a 2019 Chateau Pradeaux - on the by the glass list and it was utterly perfect - deep and intensely savoury. It could have easily dealt with the pork belly fennel and orange we shared as a main course too.

A totally lovely place with cracking food, a terrific wine list and a really nice bunch of staff.

Fideos negros con calamaritos with alioli and Rueda

I’ve never been a huge fan of Rueda, a sauvignon-style wine from the north of Spain, but seem to have been drinking it non-stop since I arrived in Malaga.

Maybe because it goes so well with the local seafood but I think they go for a fresher less pungent style here than back in the UK

This was one of the best pairings with one of my favourite dishes of the trip at Taverna Uvedoble: Fideos negros or fried squid ink noodles with baby squid and a good dollop of alioli (garlic mayo). It was SO good we went back for it a second time.

The Rueda acted with the pasta like a sharp squeeze of lemon, balancing the dark saline flavour of the noodles and the punchy alioli. A really good restaurant and a great combination

Salsa verde and Chianti Classico

Wine pairing is much more about the way you cook a dish and the sauce you serve with it than it is about the basic ingredient and so it proved with this week’s match at the recently opened Brackenbury.

It was a dish of roast skrei cod with a potato, radicchio and sage bake and salsa verde, a punchy sauce of parsley, mint, olive oil, anchovy and capers* with which the elegant young Selvapiana Chianti Rufina we had chosen paired perfectly.

There was in fact quite a lot going on in the dish that assisted the match. The fact that the cod was roasted. The radicchio and sage - both slightly bitter - and the smoothing effect of the potato but it was the tangy salsa verde that clinched it.

Note: one of the reasons it worked was because the wine was both dry and lean. The salsa would have made a riper, more full-bodied red taste much sweeter, most likely unbalancing both the wine and the match.

Obviously the wine would work just as well, if not better, if the sauce had been served with lamb or veal.

* There’s a video of Danny Bohan of the River Cafe making a salsa verde here

For my full review of The Brackenbury click here.

Image © koss13 - Fotolia.com

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.