Match of the week
Roast kid and dry Mavrodaphne
As it was my first Easter in Greece - which was celebrated a month later than that of the western Christian church this year - what could I focus on but what to drink with a Greek Easter lunch?
The centrepiece is a whole roast lamb or kid on a spit - in the case of the family I was staying with, kid. It’s simply seasoned with pepper, plenty of salt, stuffed with herbs such as thyme and rosemary then cooked slowly over the coals for 2 1/2-3 hours. The tastiest bits are the bits you pick with your fingers off the carcass and the kokoretsi - the offal, which is wrapped in the intestines and also roasted over the fire. That may, I realise, put off the more squeamish among you but it is truly delicious.
You could drink a white with this - the Greeks drink more white wine than red but the return of meat to the menu after lent calls for a bit more of a celebration. In our case that took the form of a magnum of the 2013 vintage of Gentilini’s Eclipse, an exotically fragrant dry mavrodaphne that was predictably great with the lamb but also particularly good with the more gamey flavour of the offal. If you're a Bandol fan you'd love it.
Other Greek reds such as agiorgitiko and xinomavro would obviously be good too, depending on where you are in Greece. This is definitely an occasion to drink local.
I was invited to spend Easter with Petros Markantonatos and Marianna Kosmetatos of Gentilini
Goat biryani and natural wine
I subjected myself to a somewhat daunting experience last Thursday trying to persuade a largely sceptical audience of journalists and bloggers of the virtues of natural wine. I think/hope I made some modest headway, helped by the fantastic feast laid on by chef Stevie Parle and his team at Dock Kitchen.
The highlight was a superb goat biryani topped with a salt crust and served with pomegramate seeds and coriander. It was subtly fragrant rather than spicy and seemed really well suited to the eclectic selection of bottles we had on the table which ranged from a Loire Chenin Blanc (La Pointe 1920, Les Vignes Herbels) to a cloudy but delicious Australian Pinot Noir (Domaine Lucci Wildman Pinot) the likes of which you’ve probably never tasted. More about these and the other wines on my natural wine blog shortly.
It underlined that natural wines need air and food to show at their best. Most were better a couple of hours after being opened. A couple benefited from decanting. Detractors might - and almost certainly would - say that that proves how impractical they are but you used to have to open most conventional reds such as Bordeaux well in advance.
I must say I like the quirky offbeat flavours the natural wine world offers - in the same way as I like the world of unpasteurised cheese. And the fact that all these wines were refreshingly dry rather than cloyingly heavy and sweet as so many modern reds are.
If you’re interested in natural wine there are two major events coming up in London next month: the RAW fair on May 20th and 21st and the Real Wine Fair from May 20th-22nd.
And if you feel inspired to make a biryani there’s a similar recipe (with rabbit) in Stevie’s excellent new Dock Kitchen Cookbook. And that would go with Pinot too.
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