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)

Top wine and beer pairings for game

Pot roast pheasant with St-Chinian

Once the game season starts to get into full swing my husband ventures into the kitchen. Pheasant, of course, doesn’t come into season until the 1st of October but our local butcher was obviously clearing out last year’s stocks and we picked one up for a song.

My husband pot roasted it with vegetables, spices and a heady concoction of red wine, brandy and port which as you can imagine created quite a powerful sauce for any wine to contend with so we pulled out a 2007 Thierry Navarre Le Laouzil St-Chinian we’d brought back from France. It’s a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Carignan - the latter not my favourite grape, generally - but it proved the perfect match, the wine standing up to the sauce, the sauce adding real elegance to the wine and bringing out its peppery top notes.

I remember visiting Thierry Navarre when we first went to the Languedoc in the early 1990s but his wines definitely have more finesse now. It’s stocked at £9.95 in the UK by Stone, Vine and Sun. Le Laouzil means ‘schiste’ in Occitan, according to the site.

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Braised pheasant with chestnuts and Vacqueyras

Our final pre-Christmas meal at our favourite local restaurant Culinaria the other night was a real feast of winter flavours. Unusually every dish went well with the bottle we chose, a 2005 Vacquéyras Cuvée des Templiers from Le Clos des Cazaux, a wonderfully full-flavoured blend of Syrah and Grenache that was as good as many minor Châteauneuf-du-Pâpes I’ve tasted. A real treat.

I’ve singled out the braised pheasant with chestnuts as the star match because that was the most pitch-perfect combination but my braised shoulder of mutton with root vegetables and pearl barley also went very well with it. So did our two starters, a deep-flavoured game terrine served with spiced onions and an unusual but incredibly moreish dish of braised squid with fennel, leek and orange which had a subtle touch of Moroccan spicing.

Incidentally before choosing the Vacquéyras we hovered over a 2002 Cune Rioja reserva which I think would also have worked well with this robustly flavoured style of food.

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