Radicchio, pickled pear and blue cheese salad and Le Bistro Montmija white

This crisp white wasn’t chosen as an exact match more like a wine I thought would run along with everyone’s starters when we went out to lunch at The Bull in Totnes last week

But I chose it as match of the week to illustrate that you don’t necessarily need to drink port or a sweet wine with blue cheese. The dish was a fresh-tasting salad of radicchio, pickled pears, walnuts and Beenleigh Blue (a local sheep cheese) in which the cheese was offset by the slight bitterness of the radicchio and sharpness of the pickled pears.

It needed an equally fresh fruity white and it got it in this inexpensive organic Languedoc wine which is a blend of grenache blanc, marsanne and sauvignon blanc.

You can buy it online from Vintage Roots for £8.99 and it would make a great party wine. (I like the red, which is a little soft, slightly less)

Salsa verde and Chianti Classico

Wine pairing is much more about the way you cook a dish and the sauce you serve with it than it is about the basic ingredient and so it proved with this week’s match at the recently opened Brackenbury.

It was a dish of roast skrei cod with a potato, radicchio and sage bake and salsa verde, a punchy sauce of parsley, mint, olive oil, anchovy and capers* with which the elegant young Selvapiana Chianti Rufina we had chosen paired perfectly.

There was in fact quite a lot going on in the dish that assisted the match. The fact that the cod was roasted. The radicchio and sage - both slightly bitter - and the smoothing effect of the potato but it was the tangy salsa verde that clinched it.

Note: one of the reasons it worked was because the wine was both dry and lean. The salsa would have made a riper, more full-bodied red taste much sweeter, most likely unbalancing both the wine and the match.

Obviously the wine would work just as well, if not better, if the sauce had been served with lamb or veal.

* There’s a video of Danny Bohan of the River Cafe making a salsa verde here

For my full review of The Brackenbury click here.

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