Stuffed piquillo peppers with brandade and Hunter Valley Semillon

Like many of you, I suspect, I’ve been working my way through the older bottles in my cellar* and unearthed a 2014 vintage of Brokenwood Semillon the other day which I visited on my last wine visit to the Hunter Valley.

In fact that’s quite young in Hunter semillon terms - it could really have done with another 2-3 years at least as evidenced by the fact that it tasted even better two days after opening which was when I accidentally paired it with some brandade (salt cod purée) stuffed red piquillo peppers during a Zoom cook-in with a couple of my pals.

We were cooking from Ben Tish’s Moorish from which my friend Fiona Sims (the other half of the 2 fionas!) chose this recipe. It would actually have worked well with many other crisp fruity white wines including sauvignon blanc but the element that really made the semillon sing was the accompanying orange oil which you drizzle over the peppers. (Basically olive oil infused with pared orange peel and thyme.) Often it’s these little touches that really make a match.

You can buy the latest vintage of the Brokenwood Semillon - the 2019 - from Vinvm for £17.30 a bottle - but try not to drink it all straight away! Or, if you want a more mature vintage, Street Wines of Colchester has the 2015 for £20.

For other semillon pairings see The best food matches for semillon and semillon-sauvignon blends

*well, not actually a cellar - the cupboard under the stairs!

Salt cod, oxtail and Ferñao Pires

It’s not often you have a wine flight with a tasting menu in which every pairing is so perfectly constructed that it’s almost impossible to say which was the best. Every match at Restaurant Nathan Outlaw deserved to be a match of the week but if pushed I’m going to go for this one because it was so unexpected.

It was course 4 and a beautifully balanced dish of salt cod (freshly salted, not dried) oxtail, crisply fried parsnip and chilli. Given the oxtail and the fact I’d drunk white wine up to that point I was expecting a red. But in fact sommelier Damon Little boldly stuck to white all the way through the meal and he was right - the richly textured Ferñao Pires from Quinta da Boa Esperança near Lisbon stood up to all the ingredients without overwhelming them in just the same way as the other elements in the dish respected the fish.

Ferñao Pires is a much underrated Portuguese grape variety - well, isn’t all Portuguese wine underrated? - with an exotic tropical fruit character but not in anyway coarse, confected or cloying. (You can buy it through Sommelier’s Choice in the UK)

While I’m at it let me tell you about the other course where I thought Damon might have brought in a red but which again worked with a white - in this case the Terrace 2015 from Keermont in Stellenbosch South Africa - a ‘Cape White’ blend of chardonnay, chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc and viognier - with a dish of turbot, and swede with red wine and sage. Despite the red wine sauce the white was perfect due, I suspect, to a generous amount of butter. (That wine comes from Swig)

If you’re not a white wine drinker don’t worry - there are plenty of reds on the list and I’m sure Damon could construct you a whole wine flight around them!

I ate at Nathan Outlaw as a guest of the restaurant.

Salt cod with ciambotta di peperoni and 2004 Argentiera, Bolgheri Superiore

Another interesting insight on pairing red wine and fish in Tuscany this week. We were served lightly salted cod with a rich tomato and pepper stew called ciambotta at Tenuta Argentiera which proved a perfect match for the mature 2004 vintage.

Like other wines in Bolgheri, the wine is a Bordeaux blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc but quite different in character from similar blends in the Bordeaux region which I’m not sure I’d pair with a tomato sauce at all. Much warmer, richer and sweetly mellow.

The dish was part of a buffet during which five different Argentiera wines were served with a wide range of dishes from crudo di pesce (raw seafood salad) to grilled ribeye to cheese.

As I’ve remarked before, Tuscans consider it perfectly normal to drink red wine right through the meal even though many producers now make some attractive whites and rosés.

We had a similar pairing in a trattoria called Cibreo in Florence - a dark, dense dish of squid cooked in red wine with a 2006 Stielle supertuscan (a younger vintage than is currently available on the UK market)

After a couple of days in Tuscany drinking rich full-bodied reds with fish seems quite normal.

*Here are the details of the current 2008 Argentiera

Salt cod with chorizo and Cabernet - yes, Cabernet!

Few these days dispute that red wine goes with fish - it’s just a question of which wine and how the fish is cooked. Most would accept ‘meaty' steak lookalikes like grilled or spiced tuna or salmon work with Pinot Noir but would hesitate to take it much further than that but last week I found a couple of surprisingly good fish matches at one of my favourite new wine bars 28-50.

The wine was an inexpensive 2008 Vin de Pays from Domaine Les Filles de Septembre* from the Languedoc’s Cotes de Thongue - their cuvée Dana which surprisingly turned out to be a 70/30% blend of Cabernet and Merlot. I say surprisingly because it actually tasted more like a Syrah - you could certainly pick up a violet note in it and it had a delicious suppleness to it which you don’t often find in a Cab. That’s terroir for you - although it is of course perfectly possible that it did contain a proportion of unannounced Syrah.

There were four of us and it was fine with all of our mains, two of them fishy. The most successful match was with a dish of salt cod and chorizo but it also paired unexpectedly well with a red mullet bouillabaisse, more predictably with a dish of pigs' cheeks and even survived a pissaladire. Obviously one of those useful ‘take me anywhere’ wines. You can buy it from Yapp’s for £9.50 a bottle.

*Incidentally the name of the domaine comes from the fact that all the owners four daughters were born in September!