Grey mullet, fennel and muscadet

This isn’t the first time I’ve made muscadet my match of the week but it’s a wine that’s great value, constantly improving in quality and unbelievably versatile with food.

This time it was a sure fire hit at a restaurant called Le Servan I’ll be reviewing shortly with a lovely dish of raw grey mullet with sorrel cream. fennel and a touch of fresh coriander. The dryness of the wine chimed in perfectly with the raw fish and slight sourness of the sorrel, not detracting in any way from the clean, sharp flavours.

The wine was a Clos les Montys 2013 from Domaine de la Chauvinière which was only 11%, I seem to remember, and selling for just 4€ a glass. It proves yet again you don’t have to have a wine with a high level of alcohol to carry flavour.

Interestingly the producer’s website suggests that it’s a good wine for laying down but then I have had interesting encounters with aged muscadet before (see here and here).

I reckon we’ll be seeing more of Muscadet on wine lists in 2015.

Parsley soup, snails and Muscadet!

Not the most appealing food and wine pairing you may think but I have to assure you it was delicious! It was at the newly opened Berners Tavern which is run by chef-of-the-moment Jason Atherton.

I’d dropped by for an early lunch before a tasting I was doing so decided to eat from the starter menu and it was the soup - a Caroll’s potato and parsley soup, Dorset snails, Stornaway black pudding and Breville brioche toastie, to give it its full title - that really caught my eye, not least because of the idea of eating a 70s-style toastie in a posh restaurant.

As you can see the parsley gave it an amazing deep green colour, the perfect balance to the savoury snails and black pudding. And the Muscadet - a 2010 Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine sure Lie from Domaine du Verger which they sell by the glass - had just the right crisp, clean flavour to cut through. (It would match equally well with the French classic of snails with garlic butter I reckon.)

I also tried it with a couple of oysters dressed with a Vietnamese dressing - interestingly not as good as oysters served au naturel.

By the way I’d recommend Berners Tavern if you’re looking for somewhere impressive to eat off Oxford Street. It’s not cheap but it’s one of those clever menus that has something for everyone and is an absolutely gorgeous room.

Whitebait and Muscadet-sur-Lie

Regulars may have noticed a distinct French bias in my matches of the week and have wondered why this is. The truth is that my husband is an unreconstructed Francophile so French wine is mainly what we drink at home and what we order if we’re out together.

No surprise then that the wine we chose to drink at our local seafood restaurant, Fisher’s in Bristol last night was a Muscadet* and that it proved a sufficiently good pairing to make my match of the week. (There was also a fair bit of rosé drunk in France last week which hit the spot with most of the things we were eating . . .)

Whitebait has quite a strong oily taste so is normally coated with a spicy chilli-spiked batter but this was served conservatively seasoned so needed the lemony sharpness of the Muscadet to give it a kick.

Looking at other possibilities outside France I’d go for Albarino (always good with seafood), Vinho Verde (goes with sardines so why not whitebait?), Austrian Gruner Veltliner, Hunter Valley semillon, verdelho, more minerally sauvignon blancs and almost any kind of crisp, unoaked Italian white.

Only I probably won’t get the chance to try them out ;-)

* We were so tired after travelling all day I forgot to check the producer but Fisher’s website shows the Domaine de la Tourmaline 2010. I suspect it was a more recent vintage. Majestic is selling the 2012 for £6.99 at the moment.

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!