Seabream carpaccio with blood orange and Hugel Gentil

If you’re pairing a wine with a raw starter like carpaccio you might think your choice needs to be dictated by the fish but as with other ingredients it depends what else is on the plate.

As part of a tasting menu at Caper and Cure in Bristol it came with oyster, mayonnaise, smoked caviar, mooli and blood orange but it was the orange in particular that kicked it into touch with the 2021 Hugel Gentil we had ordered.

‘Gentil’ is an unusual wine from Alsace - a officially recognised category of wine  which has to be at least 50% Riesling, Muscat, Pinot Gris and/or Gewurztraminer (this version from Hugel also contains a significant amount of Sylvaner).

It’s not as heavily scented as gewürztraminer or as sweet as muscat but definitely aromatic yet it worked really well with the dish. It also matches, as you might expect, with many Chinese, Indian and Thai dishes.

You can buy the 2022 vintage from Tanners for £15.20 or from Taurus for £15.49.

I was invited to Caper and Cure for the launch of their new menu but contributed towards the cost of the meal and the wine.

Cherries (and plums) with Central Otago Pinot Noir

One of the standard ways of devising a wine pairing is to pick out flavours in the wine and put them in the accompanying dish. Not too much or it can cancel out the flavour of the wine but done with skill, as it was by chef Des Smith at The Hunting Lodge, it’s pretty impressive.

The dish was an unctuous chicken parfait served with deep red cherries that had been macerated in pinot and a sliced - and I think also lightly pickled - plum. Two fruit notes that chimed in perfectly with their Central Otago pinot. (And also pretty good, it has to be said with their rather delicious Lagrein, a grape variety of which there is a tiny amount in New Zealand.)

The fact that the pairing was about the fruit not the parfait was underlined by the fact that I had a similar dish at Tantalus Estate on Waiheke the day before - this time made with duck liver and accompanied by pear and ginger which went really well with their pinot gris, which like most in New Zealand is made more in the Alsace style.

Often a successful pairing is more about the accents in the dish not the core ingredient. A smooth rich parfait flatters pretty well everything (except perhaps sauvignon blanc and other acidic whites) - it's the fruit you put with it that suggests the match.

Sponsored feature: What to drink with Reblochon

If you’re a fan of tartiflette, that wickedly indulgent après-ski dish of potatoes, bacon and meltingly gooey cheese, you’ll be familiar - though you may not be aware of it - with Reblochon.

It’s a typical Alpine cows’ milk cheese made on small farms up in the Savoie region of France. The name comes from the verb ‘reblocher’ - to milk twice - and refers to the practice of tenant farmers to hold back some of the milk when the landowner came to collect his dues to enable them to sneakily milk the cows a second time for cheese (the cheese dates back to the 13th century).

It’s a rich, semi-soft unpasteurised cheese with a flavoursome crust, developed by washing the rind with a salt water solution or brine. While its ability to melt deliciously lends itself to hot dishes like tartiflette it can also be enjoyed on a cheeseboard or in salads and lighter starters. (See the Reblochon website for ideas and recipes)

If you’re wondering what to drink with it an obvious starting point are the fruity white wines of Savoie, the best known of which is roussette (also known as altesse). Whites from the neighbouring Jura region including savagnin and chardonnay also work well as do the aromatic white wines of Alsace including riesling, pinot gris and with more mature, fuller-flavoured cheeses, gewurztraminer. You could even stray over the border into Switzerland for a glass of chasselas - or dôle, if you fancy a red. Lighter French reds such as pinot noir, poulsard and trousseau also tend to work better than more tannic varieties than syrah and cabernet sauvignon.

For warm summer evening drinking and Reblochon-based salads why not try a fruity rosé such as sancerre from the Loire or a glass of sparkling wine? The local Savoie sparkler bugey cerdon, should you be able to track it down, is delicious or go for a crémant du Jura.

Beer of course is always a good pairing with cheese. A blonde ale should go with younger Reblochons and darker Trappist ales with more mature ones (Reblochon can be matured for between 4 and 12 months.) A medium-dry cider is also a delicious match.

More adventurous choices could include a dry amontillado or - even better - palo cortado sherry or - closer to the area the cheese is made - a fragrant Chambéry vermouth. You could even try an apple or pear-flavoured eau de vie or schnapps such as Poire William which would play on the fruity flavours of the cheese.

For more information about Reblochon visit the official Reblochon de Savoie website.

Hot smoked salmon, Korean carrots and pinot gris

This is one of those serendipitous pairings you sometimes stumble across when you rustle up a scratch meal and pair it with an open bottle in the fridge.

The hot smoked salmon came from the Co-op, the carrots from a recipe in Olia Hercules marvellous Mamushka which was my book of the month last month and the wine, a G Stepp Pinot Gris 3 from the Pfalz from a selection I was sent by Naked Wines, which is £11.49 to ‘Angels’ (i.e. regular Naked Wines subscribers) £16.99 to the rest of us.

That may frustrate those of you who, like me, aren’t Angels (I’m currently conducting an experiment to see how long it takes me to get to the top of the waiting list. I'm 6105 at the moment) but there are other dry - or dry-ish - pinot gris on the market that would do the job equally well. (New Zealand, as you can see from this post a few months back, is another excellent source.)

The Korean carrots are more like a pickle than a salad so more salty than hot. Well worth making if you have the book.

What this match underlines is that pinot gris (aka grauburgunder) works as well with smoke and pickled flavours as it does with spice, making it a really useful companion for south-east Asian, Scandi and central European food