Peruvian-style scallops and Rioja rosado

I thought it was pretty brave of rioja producer Ramon Bilbao to present their wines at a cutting edge Peruvian restaurant last week. Still, everyone knows rioja goes with Spanish food so why not? You never make new wine pairing discoveries if you don’t push the envelope.

The restaurant was Lima, a modern Peruvian restaurant that is owned by the chef Virgilio Martinez who is ranked 4th in the World 50 Best List. It also has a Michelin star.

The food is not particularly spicy but full of vibrant colours and flavours - this scallop dish of raw scallops with tigers milk and passionfruit sounds like one of those nightmare combinations that shouldn’t work but was absolutely delicious.

It was paired not with a white but their top level Lalomba rosé which as it happens I’d put in my top 30 gastronomic rosés in Decanter a couple of months ago. It’s very clean, fresh and elegant without any overtly fruity flavours and suited the dish perfectly.

Other wines that showed well were the Ramon Bilbao Sauvignon Blanc from Rueda which went with a starter of quinoa with sweet potato and fresh cheese and a really fabulous Andean potato stew with seaweed. The fresh-tasting Ramon Bilbao Vinedos de Altura rioja 2014 was also perfect with a dish of suckling pig.

It can’t have been easy to make the pairings work so successfully so all credit to the chef Robert Ortiz for tailoring his food so well to the wines.

I ate at Lima as a guest of Ramon Bilbao.

Sparkling wine and spicy snacks

The idea of drinking sparkling wine with Indian street food might seem crazy but it’s a really good pairing as I was reminded last night when I dined at Masala Zone just off Carnaby Street with Warren Edwardes, the CEO of a company called Wine for Spice.

Edwardes sells three wines which you’d probably consider unremarkable if you tasted them on their own but which are cleverly designed to deal with the heat of spicy food. He deliberately set out to replicate the effect of a lager, still most people’s drink of choice with a curry. by creating a wine that had a refreshing spritz - less fizzy than a sparkling wine but fizzier than a still one. The wines are also modest in alcohol which means that you can swig rather than sip them.

The pairing I thought worked best was his Viceroy White, a blend of the grapes that are used to make cava (Macabbeo, Parellada and Xarel-lo) and just 11.5% We tried it with two different spicy snacks - chicken tikka served with a fresh coriander chutney and some sev puri, crisp little biscuits topped with spicy mash and fresh chutneys and scattered with what looked like deep-fried vermicelli. As usual with sparkling wines it paired really well with the crisp snack but also handled the stronger flavours of the marinated chicken and chutney well, both dishes enhancing the natural creaminess of the wine.

I also tried his Raja Rosé, a strong dry rosé, again made in Spain from Tempranillo and Garnacha with a lamb thali based on rogan josh and a hottish Goan prawn curry with his Rani Gold, a blend of the Catalan grape varieties above with 50% Muscat, quite similar to Torres Viña Esmeralda. Again, given the strength of the wines (12.5% and 11.5% respectively) they held up surprisingly well because of the spritz. (One of the reasons Edwardes - a banker in a former life - makes them semi-sparkling is because the wine attracts a lower tax rate than sparkling wines like Champagne but they also do the job of refreshing the palate without making you feel excessively bloated or gassy.)

Would I serve the wines at home? I’m not sure that I would (I’d probably go for full-strength fizz) but I’d be extremely grateful to find them in an Indian restaurant. You can apparently buy them from Ocado in the UK or contact Warren through his website wineforspice.com

Incidentally, Masala Zone is a great place to go for a quick meal if you’re in the West End. It serves genuinely authentic Indian street food at a very fair price. There are also branches in Islington and Earl's Court.

Salade Niçoise and Rosé

The weather has been so unseasonally hot over the last couple of days - well into the 20s (or the late 70s for those of you who prefer to think in Fahrenheit) - that I’m suddenly fast-forwarding to summer and one of my favourite meals, Salade Niçoise.

It’s one of those classic dishes over which strong views rage - over the presence or absence of tuna, anchovies or, more controversially still, green beans and potatoes. Jacques Médecin in his Cuisine Niçoise claims that the original was made predominantly of tomatoes and consists exclusively of raw ingredients (apart from hard-boiled eggs) and would not have been dressed with a vinaigrette, merely with olive oil. Seared tuna, a popular replacement for tinned tuna nowadays, is a totally new-fangled invention.

Personally I like to gild the lily so I break all the rules. I blanch some fine green beans and refresh them with cold water. I lay them on a plate and scatter them with small, sweet cherry tomatoes, some torn fresh basil leaves and some generous chunks of tuna (I like the Spanish tuna which comes in jars rather than in tins. Ortiz is a good brand). I drizzle all that with a little vinaigrette, top it with some halved or quartered hard boiled eggs over each of which I sometimes (unforgiveably) dollop a teaspoon of mayo. I drape anchovies over the top than scatter the salad with a handful of black olives. I serve warm, buttered new potatoes with it. And a glass of rosé, of course.

You can drink any rosé you like but I personally find the fruitier styles from Chile and elsewhere in the New World just a bit too sweet for this dish. I also find many Provencal rosés a touch wimpy. What you need is a bold, dry southern French rosé from the Rhône or the Languedoc. The rosés from Costières de Nîmes are particularly good. Or a Spanish rosado from Rioja or Navarra. But that would probably break the rules too.

Photo © Ivan Mateev @fotolia.com