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

Roast goose with Nebbiolo

As a chef friend who recently took over a farm had some geese to get rid of we had goose for our main Christmas meal this year - stuffed somewhat improbably with hay (long story. Not such a good idea!)

We picked out a bottle we’d recently bought from another friend Marc Millon who runs a small wine business called Vino importing Italian wines from small growers. It was a 2005 Langhe Nebbiolo from Cascina Fontana, a Barolo producer with whom they’ve been dealing for years. You can read more about them here
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It was just perfect with the goose, having the acidity to cut through the fat and a lovely dark, damsony flavour - still fruity enough at 4 years old to take on the accompanying red cabbage but not so intense as to overwhelm an already full-flavoured plateful. It also went very well with the pork and fennel rillettes for which I posted a recipe the other day.

I don’t know how Vino’s stocks of the 2005 stand but the 2007 vintage is currently selling in Berry Bros & Rudd for £20, quite a bit cheaper than the £33.50 you would pay for the Fontana's Barolo.

Fonduta with truffles and Nebbiolo

The last few days I’ve been eating and drinking my way around Piedmont - the perfect time of year as the region’s fabled white truffles are in season.

Generally they are served as simply as possible so as not to disguise their heady, exotic flavour - the two most common ways are shaving them over a rich egg pasta called tajarin or serving them with eggs but I had a really wonderful dish at the one Michelin-starred restaurant La Ciau del Tornavento just outside Alba which showed them off to perfection.

The base was cardoons (cardi), a celery-like vegetable with a faintly artichoke-like taste which is very popular in the region, topped with a rich fonduta (fondue) of Taleggio and the local Castelmagno cheese. Truffles were shaved lavishly over the top.

Normally you’d think of drinking white wine with fondue but here they pretty well always serve it - and truffles - with some kind of Nebbiolo such as Barolo, Barbaresco or, the wine we enjoyed with it, the less-well known Roero (my companion, who lived in the Roero area picked a 2001 Roche d’Ampsej from Matteo Correggia).

What makes the match work is the marked acidity of these wines, the absence of intrusive tannins and the cool room temperature - 17° - 18° C, I would guess - at which they typically serve them (The standard of wine service in the region is outstanding.)

I’ve also had a few other thoughts on matching wine with truffles so I’ll be posting those shortly.