Salad caprese and malagousia

One of the objectives of the organisers of our trip to Greece last week was to try to show how Greek wines pair with other international cuisines and flavours. It resulted in some quite bizarre dishes like black eye beans and kiwi fruit and chicken with carrot cream and tangerine gel but also provided some useful new insights.

One was how assyrtiko - Greece’s most popular and famous white wine - is not the only Greek wine you can pair with tomatoes. Malagousia, another crisp dry white but with a more of a floral character, works too.

It proved a really good match for a caprese-style salad with tomatoes, mozzarella and a zucchini/courgette pesto - against all my expectations, highlighting the tomato flavour. (My photo was so rubbish that this is a stock photo but the dish we tried also had ham in it.)

We actually tasted it blind as one of the rules of the trip, which was funded by the EU, was that we were not allowed to know what wines we were tasting as the focus was supposed to be on the PGIs or sub-regions but I later discovered it came from the Petriessa Estate on the island of Evia. (Seems counter-intuitive when you’re talking to the trade but there you go ...)

Malagousia also proved a good pairing with taramasalata and would also work well with classic Greek meze like hummus, tzatziki, olives and vine leaves and with spanakopita.

I participated in the trip as a guest of Wines of Central Greece. Photo by Viktor1 at shutterstock.com

Mature Savennières with chargrilled carrots, burnt aubergine, miso and walnut pesto

OK, this pairing at Jason Atherton’s new Social Wine and Tapas isn’t exactly easy to reproduce at home but it was certainly the highlight of my food and wine matches last week.

The dish was a clever and complicated one from the vegetable section of the tapas menu (defining tapas pretty loosely, admittedly) and one of the best vegetarian dishes I’ve had in London. There were powerful smoky notes from the charred carrot and aubergine, a rich umami taste from the miso and a generous dollop of nutty pesto - quite a lot for any wine to contend with.

It was paired on the advice of the sommelier Stefan with a flight of Savennières which he’d been instrumental in putting together because one of the wines - a 1992 Roche aux Moines from Domaine aux Moines - was his birth year (gah!). It was somewhat less youthful than Stefan but hugely interesting to try. The wine of the flight that worked best was the gorgeously honeyed, peachy 2011 Les Genets from Domaine Laureau with great acidity which held its own magnificently with the different elements of the dish.

The wine flights are definitely the way to go at Social Wine & Tapas. They offer you a chance to try some really interesting wines - served in appropriate glasses or stemware. My Savennières flight was £21 which is not cheap for 225ml of wine,, but I didn’t want to drink more than that and a bottle of the Genet would have cost £35. You can buy the wines to take away, if you like them, in the small retail shop on the ground floor.

Peter Gordon's beef pesto and Pencarrow pinot noir

I found myself back in an old haunt last week - Peter Gordon’s The Providores in London’s Marylebone High Street. As the bar was crowded we went up to the restaurant and treated ourselves to the à la carte*

This was a classic from Peter’s Sugar Club days - a dish of incredibly tender beef fillet with a warm chard, courgette and beetroot salad with a garlic dressing, green pesto and kalamata olives. It was great with the wine I was drinking, a bright, fruity 2011 Pencarrow Pinot Noir from Martinborough that I’d chosen as a versatile option with the myriad flavours that Peter puts on the plate but I suspect those ingredients, especially the garlic, pesto and olives would have made almost any red wine sing.

Pencarrow turns out to be an introductory range from the prestigious Palliser estate which accounts for the quality. You can currently buy it as a bin end from loveyourwine.co.uk for £10.99, on special offer from the New Zealand House of Wine if you buy two bottles, and £12.79 from Noel Young wines. (Check wine-searcher.com for other stockists.)

*Great food but not a cheap option. We spent £130 for 2 for 3 courses, 1 side and 2 glasses of wine. If you're looking for a casual supper I'd stick to the Tapa Room downstairs. The winelist in both is excellent though.

Rheinhessen silvaner and penne with tomatoes and peppers

I must confess I’ve never associated German wines with pasta dishes especially ones based on summer vegetables like tomatoes and peppers but then I haven’t come across many genuinely dry German wines in Italian restaurants before.

This was our lunch on the first day of my current trip to Germany at Weingut Brüder Dr. Becker who make biodynamic wines in the village of Ludgwigshöhe in the Rheinhessen.

They make a couple of silvaners - a local grape for the region - both dry: a simple crisp fruity ‘Grüner Silvaner’ and a village wine - the Ludwigshöhe Silvaner which is fermented in large wooden vats and left on its lees for greater complexity. Neither, sadly, is available in the UK at the moment.

For lunch they laid out a summery spread of gazpacho and big dishes of vegetable pasta, obviously made with locally grown ingredients. As well as the penne, which was quite piquant, there was a linguine with chanterelles, chives and parmesan. Oh, and a generous bowl of freshly made pesto to spoon over them.

The silvaners were similar to drinking dry Italian whites - i.e. a very good match. Their rieslings went well too but I’ll be posting some more thoughts on matching German riesling after the trip.