Grilled monkfish with salsa verde and vermentino

Monkfish is regularly referenced as a meaty fish you can pair with red wine, especially when it’s wrapped in pancetta but suppose you serve it with salsa verde instead as they did at the Seahorse al Mare pop-up in Dartmouth last week?

Suddenly it becomes all about the herbs and points you in the direction of a white wine rather than a red especially when the sides - a salad of mixed leaves, tarragon and olive oil and braised green beans with white onion and agrodolce - also have vegetal notes

It turned out that the wine we had ordered - a richly textured 2018 Audarya Vermentino di Sardegna* had herby notes of its own but it was also weighty enough to cope with the fact that the fish had been cooked over open coals.

It went less well with the more delicate course of some very delicious fresh Dartmouth crab with fennel which was better with the glass of champagne they had offered us.

But then champagne by the water - what’s not to like?

I was a guest at Seahorse al Mare which is currently taking reservations for August

You can buy the Audarya Vermentino from Sommeliers Choice for £14.50 a bottle

See also the best wine pairings with monkfish.

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.

Image © koss13 - Fotolia.com

La Réserve de Léoville Barton with roast lamb and salsa verde

We had a celebration dinner with old friends the other night at my favourite local restaurant Culinaria so cracked open a bottle of La Réserve de Léoville Barton 2004*, a St Julien and the second wine of Léoville Barton. It really was quite lovely - rich, plummy, velvety - at its peak but with a few more years to go. It was everything you want from red Bordeaux (unless you have bottomless pockets)

For once I let the wine dictate my food choice, opting for a classic dish of roast lamb with salsa verde instead of the wild Irish sea trout with hake, langoustine and saffron cream sauce I actually fancied. I guess it would probably have rubbed by but the wine would undoubtedly have overwhelmed the delicacy of the dish. I was a little concerned about the salsa verde too but I needn’t have worried. It worked perfectly adding a herbal note that picked up perfectly on the claret. - much better, I remember thinking at the time, than that British abomination mint sauce.

I think it would probably have been a decent cheese wine if we had stuck to sympathetic cheeses such as not-over-matured cheddar, young washed-rind cheeses and sheeps’ cheese but we couldn’t resist pudding (pannacotta with Yorkshire rhubarb and blood orange)

Stephen Markwick of Culinaria, I can't resist mentioning, is the chef with whom I wrote a book last year: ‘A Very Honest Cook’ which you can buy from the restaurant for the incredibly modest price of £10 + p & p!

*You can buy the 2004 from Vineyards Direct at £22.95 a bottle if you buy by the case - about £5 less a bottle than I paid locally.