Match of the week
Pistachio pesto and solaris
One of the best food pairing experiences I’ve come across in a winery is the one laid on by Hebron vineyard in West Wales.
It obviously helps that the co-owner of the vineyard, Jemma Vickers, is also a caterer and that she and her partner, Paul have a garden which produces most of the veg they serve but she lays on regular wine and ‘tapas’ tastings with which you can taste their organic low intervention wines
All the pairings were interesting but the one that particularly stood out for me was a dish of finely sliced raw courgettes with a pistachio pesto (top left) - made without cheese, with pistachios rather than pinenuts and with less basil than in the Ligurian version which made it gently creamy rather than pungent.
It worked brilliantly well with their light, fresh, citrussy almost appley 2021 Solaris which is only 9 1/2%. It’s made in an amphora and is unfined and unfiltered. (And they serve extra ingredients on the side like mayonnaise and chilli so you can see how they react with the wine too.)
They also make a 7% red from rondo - an ABV so low they’re not allowed to call it wine but it still showed really well with some slow cooked lamb and salsa verde.
If you’re in that part of Wales it’s a really charming place to visit and the vineyard where the vines are trained up willow saplings (a strategy to combat mildew) is just gorgeous.
You can buy both wines from their website for £28 and book tours and tastings via this link.
I was given a complimentary tasting and tour by Hebron vineyard.
Pistachio and date cookies with Cavendish Vin de Liqueur
An incredible pairing this week and one I’m afraid you’re unlikely to be able to replicate - so far as the wine element is concerned anyway. But there are alternatives which I’ll suggest.
My cookbook club finally got together in person after over a year and celebrated with a feast from one of my favourite cookbooks Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin, a marvellous book of Palestinian food (Sami himself is Palestinian).
We all brought a dish (I made the sumac onion and herb oil buns which you can see on my food_writer instagram feed) but my friend, food writer Xanthe Clay, made these ma’amoul bars which are light, crumbly cookies stuffed with either pistachio or date paste. They’re delicately spiced, fragrant but not overly sweet and Xanthe served them with strawberry ice cream (bouza) made with mastic and fresh strawberries.
Cue a dessert wine - maybe a muscat - but what we in fact had was a 1956 vintage of Cavendish, a South African 'vin de liqueur' which our host Luke more than generously shared with us. It’s a tawny port-style wine, bottled after 25 years in barrel and still vibrant after 65 years but without that extended oak-aged character that can make older ports taste more about the wood than the fruit. In some ways it was more like a sherry and just unbelievably delicious.
Anyway I reckon these cookies would also make a good accompaniment for other aged fortified wines like tawny ports, VORS sherries, old madeiras or mature Australian stickies for which it’s hard to find a good dessert pairing but with which you might just want a nibble of something sweet.
An amazing experience.
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