Lamb with Nebbiolo d’Alba

For some reason I always think of beef with nebbiolo and other wines like Bordeaux and rioja with lamb but this combination at one of Bristol’s best restaurants Bulrush the other night was stunning.

The dish was a complicated one by chef George Livesey’s own admission. I got him to run through it and this is how he described it

"That particular dish is a labour of love with a lot of long processes like the dehydrated and smoked lambs heart which takes about a week, from start to finish! Here’s a recap:

BBQ loin and mini fillet

Slowly cooked and glazed belly with black garlic and mushroom ketchup

Shallot stuffed with lamb mousse and smoked lamb heart

Confit silver skin

Glazed sweetbread

The sauce is a classic lamb jus with slowly cooked tongue, crispy belly and pickled wild garlic stems

Nasturtium leaf and artichoke purée."

As you can see there were a couple of gamey and smoky elements - smoked lamb hearts and tongue and I think it was those that were the key to the match. That and the fact the dish was very rich and the nebbiolo, a 2017 La Pipina from La Biòca offered a contrasting freshness and acidity that certainly a riper new world wine would not have delivered. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be available in the UK.

It was part of an accompanying wine flight that included all sorts of interesting choices and the rest of the food was spectacular too as you can see from my recent instagram post. It’s not a cheap night out (count on £125 a head including wine and service) but for the quality of the food it’s well worth it. It deserves its Michelin star.

For other lamb pairings see Top wine pairings for lamb

Cassoulet and red Bordeaux

One of the questions I regularly get asked is what to drink with a special bottle. The general expectation is that I’ll suggest a meal of Michelin-starred quality but as this match of the week shows a rustic dish will do very nicely.

The wine was a 2009 Cuvée Barthélemy from a biodynamic Bordeaux producer Château le Puy whose wines I’ve written about before. Although they could legitimately be classified as ‘natural’ they don’t taste at all funky but smooth, polished and, in the case of this particular bottle, still surprisingly vibrant for a 12 year old wine.

I pulled one out to drink with a slow braised lamb dish from the Towpath café cookbook I made on Saturday night which includes 3 heads (heads not cloves) of garlic but is cooked for so long it doesn’t taste overly garlicky.

Even better I drink the remainder of the bottle with an improvised cassoulet I made with some of the leftover lamb, some Judion beans, half the remaining confit garlic, a duck leg I serendipitously found in the freezer and some mini chorizos which would no doubt outrage any self respecting Toulousian.

Anyway the Barthélemy was gorgeous with it, retaining all its richness and suppleness and handling the (admittedly) mild heat of the chorizo really well. A real treat but sadly not a cheap one. The cost of the more recent vintages at Buon Vino which stocks most of their range is £125-145 a bottle but their more affordable cuvées should work too.

For other cassoulet pairings see Six of the best wine pairings with Cassoulet. You'll find the cassoulet recipe I normally make rather than this cheat's version here.

Lamb tagine with prunes and Châteauneuf-du-Pape

You might not immediately think of wine in the context of Moroccan food but in fact Morocco has been a significant wine producer since the days of the French protectorate. And they planted the same grape varieties - grenache, syrah and cinsault that thrive in the south of France.

So it’s no surprise really to find that a lamb tagine, which is quite a red wine-friendly dish anyway, would work with a rather glorious 2016 Châteauneuf-du-Pape from Château Mont-Redon, the only revelation being that it showed off the wine quite so well.

I adapted the recipe from Claudia Roden’s Arabesque, adding a teaspoon of honey which nicely offset the slight bitterness of the saffron and cinnamon without making the dish in any way cloying though, together with the prunes, it left a lingering touch of sweetness in the dish which married well with the generous opulence of the wine. The root vegetables I served with it - roast carrots and parsnips - worked well too.

You can buy it from Justerini and Brooks who sent me the sample and have just released the 2019 vintage en primeur.

For other wine pairings with other styles of tagine see Which wine to Pair with a Moroccan Tagine

Koftas with tahini and orange wine

I’ve been enthusiastically cooking from Sami Tamimi’s and Tara Wigley's new book Falastin this past couple of weeks and made their recipe for koftas with tahini, potato and onion over the weekend during a Zoom cooking session with a couple of pals in Bristol.

I picked an orange wine, Bulgarian Heritage from a producer called Via Vinera to pair with it on the basis that middle-eastern lamb dishes generally go well with orange wine but in fact it was the very rich tahini sauce which was spiked with lemon juice and garlic that really made the wine sing.

Sami, as you may or may not know, is Yotam Ottolenghi’s business partner and collaborated with him on the wonderful Jerusalem and Ottolenghi Simple but this is a tribute to his home country of Palestine.

The wine which comes from the 2018 vintage is made from a Bulgarian grape called dimyat and is quite aromatic with a pronounced flavour of dried apricots, quince, and yes, orange. Not at all scary so quite a good bottle to try if you’ve never had orange wine before. Particularly if you’re eating lamb although the Via Vinera website also charmingly suggests it as ‘demanded company’ for seafood salads, gnocchi and pesto, salmon trout baked in salt, grilled pork chops and soft cheeses.

You can buy it from the Wine Society if you’re a member for £51 a case of six (the equivalent of £8.50 a bottle but they’re only doing unsplit cases at the moment) but I’m confident that other orange wines would work too.