Pumpkin ravioli and sparkling albarino

Having ended up unexpectedly in hospital last week I struggled a bit to find a match of the week. Water doesn’t make the most inspiring pairing for food although it (the food in hospital) isn't by any means as bad as it used to be. So I’ll tell you about the the dish I had before I was taken ill.

It was a guest lunch at The Seahorse in Dartmouth cooked by Angela Hartnett and featured one of her wonderful silky pastas - ravioli stuffed (I vaguely recall) with pumpkin and hazelnuts and scattered with lavish amounts of parmesan.

I wouldn’t say it was the perfect match with the glass of sparkling albarino I was drinking, an ultra-dry Albarino Brut Nature, from Mar de Frades which was probably designed to go with the antipasti but it was certainly good enough. I also loved the intelligent wine list which is divided up by price.

If you want to try Angela’s food - and you should - visit one of her Cafe Muranos in London in St James’s Street and Covent Garden. Or Murano itself though that's quite a bit more expensive.

Chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble and Bayonne ham with white Bairrada

I’m having a bit of thing about Portuguese wine at the moment - it’s so great with food and such brilliantly good value. Especially on restaurant wine lists where it’s invariably underpriced in comparison to better known wine producing countries and regions

So I zoomed in on the Filipa Pato Enscaios Branco Bairrada 2012* when I spotted it on the Grainstore list the other day hoping it would go with the very different flavours and textures of the dishes we’d ordered.

It did but I think this was the best match: a warm salad of chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble, prune vinegar (didn’t pick that up) and Bayonne ham with a nicely judged combination of sweetness, bitterness, nuttiness and umami which played beautifully with the lushness and richness (but dryness) of the wine, a blend of Arinto and Bical.

It was also good with my more raw-tasting starter of sprouting beans and seeds, miso aubergine and crispy chicken skin which I guess had a fair amount of umami too.

(The menu matches the endive dish with one of the house cocktails - a green tomato Margarita which I must say sounds unlikely. Maybe the numbers have slipped out of sync. Then again maybe not. I need to go back to find out - at least that's my excuse.)

*Happily it's available at Oddbins at £11.75

For my review of Grainstore click here though I did encounter a couple of less successful dishes this time.

Cauliflower tortellini with hazelnuts and 10 year old Muscadet

I agonised over which match to highlight this week - there were so many good ones, especially from my trip to the Jura which I’ll report on in the next couple of days but I’ve gone for this intriguing and off the wall pairing from a seasonal wine dinner at Lido in Bristol on Saturday night.

First the Muscadet - a 2001 vintage from Nicolas Choblet which spends 9 years on its lees in an underground tank. You’d think it would be dead as a dodo after that but in fact it was still extraordinarily crisp and fresh though with a nutty richness that proved the key to the pairing.

The dish was lovely too. Smooth rich cauliflower puree, toasted hazelnuts, melted butter plus a few chopped capers and olives to offset the richness. The nuttiness of the wine keyed into the hazelnuts and the acidity kept the combination fresh in the way that a more full-bodied Chardonnay, say, wouldn’t have done.

I also liked a younger Choblet Muscadet le Pavillon 2009 with a dish of plaice, crab, lovage, shrimp and ground elder. (Many of the ingredients in the dinner were foraged and added a note of bitterness that also worked well with the crisp young wine). It also worked well with a spicy Moroccan-style dish of rabbit, broad beans, peas, morcillla and mint which had a fair hit of chilli and rather overwhelmed the light Cabernet blend which was served with it.

Someone asked me the other day on Twitter whether I thought there would be a Muscadet revival and I said I didn’t see why not. It’s much improved as a wine, flexible with light, modern food - this is another wine dinner that was dominated by white wine - and has retro appeal. Let’s see if it happens!

Chocolate terrine with Brachetto d'Acqui 2007

It’s a mystery to me why we need a Chocolate Week. Surely no-one (except aberrants like myself who have an inexplicable preference for potatoes) needs encouraging to eat chocolate. But there we have it and you’ll find plenty of opportunities to enjoy your favourite food in the country’s classiest chocolate shops over the next few days.

So this week’s match had to be chocolate-related really and the best match I’ve had recently was at the Piemontese wine dinner I mentioned the other day - a rich chocolate terrine with roasted hazelnuts (above) with a Brachetto d’Acqui from Contero.

Now I’ve written many times before about the virtues of sweet reds with dark chocolate but it was extraordinary how well this very light (5.5%) sparkling dry red paired with such a rich dessert thanks to a bitter cherry twist that picked out the accompanying dark berry sauce quite beautifully. I suspect it would also go well with desserts that contained blackberries. You can find it in one of this country’s most interesting wine merchants The Flying Corkscrew and also in everywine.co.uk which charges £75.04 for a case of six.

If you want to pursue your passion for chocolate you can find out more about what events are being held this week in the events section of www.chocolate-week.co.uk. There seem to be tastings of chocolate with every conceivable beverage including wine, cognac, tea, sake and even a cheese and chocolate matching though I’m not quite so sure about the wisdom of that one . . .