Match of the week
A rich jus and Ju de Vie
You’d think a rich winey sauce or jus would be the easiest thing to match with red wine but that isn’t necessarily the case as it tends to compete with it.
In this case the jus was particularly intense - accompanying a braised featherblade of beef in a fantastic dish from Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros at Home takeaway menu.
I was sent it - and a couple of other dishes* - by my pal Mike Boyne of Bin Two in Padstow together with matching wines in frustration at not being able to get together for a meal this year. The Ju de vie is from Julien Mus of Domaine de la Graveirett, a biodynamic producer in the Rhone and classified as a vin de France due to the unusual blend of merlot, marselan, grenache and mourvèdre.
Although it was 14% there was a freshness and savouriness to it that offset the sweet richness of the sauce (also due to being aged in concrete tanks rather than oak) and I was thinking that if you’d served a Napa cabernet or Barossa shiraz with it it would just have been too much.
It also went really well with a coq au vin I made the following night.(Yup, it has been a really indulgent couple of days and Christmas hasn’t even started yet. Still, we all need cheering up this year, don’t we?)
You can buy the Ju de Vie from Mike at Bin Two for £15.50.
* Braised octopus with morcilla and chickpeas with a brilliant Georgian orange wine called Teliani Valley Kakhuri No 8 and banana cake with butterscotch sauce and candied pecans with the 2017 MAD Tokaji late harvest wine both great pairings too.
Roast lamb with wild garlic risotto, asparagus and feta with a chilled Languedoc red
This match, which I enjoyed at Plateau wine bar in Brighton last week, breaks a couple of wine pairing conventions. Firstly that you match red meat with a full bodied red. And secondly that you don’t drink red wine with asparagus.
But in fact the grassy notes of the asparagus and the accompanying wild garlic risotto were just perfect with this natural, slightly mineral blend of mourvèdre and grenache called Les Fainéants produced by Opi d’Aqui just outside Clermont l’Herault. As they would be with a lightly chilled Loire Cabernet Franc. (The saltiness of the feta helped too.)
I also had a lamb tagine this week with a natural red from the Côtes du Brian in the Minervois which was an equally good match. What natural wine naysayers should at least acknowledge is that fresh-tasting reds without excessive extraction or tannin are great with food.
To read about the other restaurants I visited in Brighton click here and for a longer list of asparagus pairings, here.
Brill with oxtail and Domaine Tempier Bandol
About the most unlikely wine match you could imagine - a delicate fish with a 19 year old red wine - but it worked! Which shows you can always be surprised by food and wine pairing.
It was at Bell’s Diner in Bristol and a very bold surf’n’turf dish. The key to the match was the accompanying braised oxtail which was subtle enough not to overwhelm the fish but robust enough to call for a red rather than a white.
You wouldn’t want to drink even a mature wine like this with brill on its own or with much lighter accompaniments, obviously - or at least I wouldn’t. And a younger Bandol or mourvèdre would have certainly overwhelmed the dish, even with the oxtail.
I’ve written about this Domaine Tempier vintage before. It’s a favourite wine and when we had it at The Nobody Inn last summer we bought two extra bottles, one of which we demolished at this dinner. (We had the opportunity to bring our own wine).
A wine that can work with steak and ale pie AND with white fish. Now that is something!
RSS
Most popular
.jpg)
9 great wine pairings for duck (updated)
My latest book
How to Drink without DrinkingNews and views
.jpg)
Fine Wine and Fast Food
About Fiona
About Matching Food & Wine
Work with me
