Match of the week
Chambolle-Musigny and game
No earth-shattering revelations this week, just a reminder that mature red burgundy is a brilliant match for game.
Our cooking group cooked up a feast on Saturday including partridge salad with beetroot and walnuts and an elaborate ‘chartreuse of game, a multi-layered beauty of a dish incorporating several kinds of game (partridge, pheasant and pigeon in this case), wrapped in vegetables (multi-coloured carrots and cabbage).
Neither of the dishes was particularly ‘gamey’ but had a distinctive game character you wanted to respect so thanks to my pal chef Barny Haughton for bringing along a delicate 2000 Chambolle Premier Cru Les Sentiers from Maison Roche de Bellene which was still astonishingly bright and fresh given the vintage. Chambolle is one of my favourite red burgundies especially with lighter game like partridge.
The best wine pairing for partridge
We also had a delicious (but not particularly photogenic) dish of gnocchi with wild boar and venison ragu which went brilliantly with a 2006 Gros Noré Bandol from Provence, an exotic, dark, sensuous red and one of my favourites with richer game dishes. Unfortunately I haven’t been buying it recently so am now clean out of it - I've just had to order a case of the 2012 (from Gauntleys in Nottingham if you want to do likewise)
Roast partridge and Pinot Noir
I’ve already suggested pinot noir as a good pairing for partridge so it was good to find the recommendation vindicated at lunch with Carolyn Martin of Creation Wines at 67 Pall Mall last week.
We’d already tasted our way through their latest releases and I’d earmarked the partridge on the strength of their still very youthful but delicious 2016 Art of Pinot Noir. Interestingly it tasted much smoother and more mellow with the bird - a reflection of how it will round out as it ages.
I also liked the Art of Chardonnay with the dish which worked largely because there was a layer of creamed sweetcorn under the bird and some roasted squash on the side - two ingredients that pair really well with chardonnay
We also had a very interesting tasting of different herbs and flowers with the wines - Martin has done pioneering work on matching flowers and wine which forms the basis for one of the many wine and food tastings at her and her husband Jean-Claude's Hemel-en-Aarde winery. It’s prompted me to start putting down my own thoughts on matching wine and herbs which I’ll post shortly.
For other pairing options with partridge see
The best wine pairings with partridge
I ate at 67 Pall Mall as a guest of Creation Wines
10 year old Bonnes-Mares grand cru burgundy and confit duck
Rooting round the cellar (well, cupboard under the stairs) in France last week I stumbled across a bottle of 2003 Bonnes-Mares, a Grand Cru burgundy from Jean-Luc Aegerter I’d been sent as a sample about eight years ago and furtively stashed away until it was ready to drink.
The sensible thing would have been to put it to one side - it still had plenty of life in it but sometimes you just think ‘what the heck?’. We decided to crack it open.
I can’t claim the food we had - confit duck and hasselback potatoes - totally did it justice but it was fine. With great bottles like this you don’t necessarily want the food to eclipse the wine.
I might have cooked a roast duck, had I had time to find a good one locally which would have been less aggressively salty. A simply roast chicken, guineafowl or partridge would also have been a good match as would a roast rack of lamb or even a fillet steak. But no heavy extracted sauces.
And definitely not a pungent Epoisses - a pairing of which the French seem inordinately fond but which IMHO would have killed it stone dead.
And the wine? Bright, fine, delicate with a lovely waft of raspberries and redcurrants and a beautiful silky finish - pinot noir at its delectable best.
For more information about Bonnes-Mares, a 15ha vineyard which spans the communes of Chambolle-Musigny and Morey-Saint-Denis see Clive Coates' website here.
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