Octopus and albarino

Octopus is a bit of a cult ingredient on restaurant menus at the moment. I’ve already noted two good wine pairings for it - with Baga and orange wine but this weekend I found another at the Sabor pop-up Polperia at the Dartmouth Food Festival.

Chef Nieves Barragan was serving it very simply - boiled in a huge vat of boiling salted water and dressed with good olive oil and a sprinkling of pimenton - and offering a glass of Mar de Frades albarino from Rias Baixas on the side. The clean slightly saline wine was just perfect with the octopus, offsetting the richness of the oil and accentuating the spicy pimenton.

Given I’ve now shown it goes with white wine, red wine and orange or amber wine it actually turns out to be a really easy ingredient to match! I suspect it would work well with a dry rosé too.

Grilled octopus and Baga

Octopus seems an unlikely ingredient to be on trend but you’ll find it on a lot of restaurant menus at the moment. It’s far from an easy creature to cook (like squid it’s classified as a cephalopod rather than a fish) and it’s a measure of the kitchen’s skill as to whether it turns out tough or not.

Bar Douro, an appealing little wine bar in Flatiron Square just down the road from Borough Market passed with flying colours - it was deeply savoury and beautifully tender, served with deep-fried and puréed sweet potato .

I had been drinking a white at the time it appeared but immediately thought I’d prefer a red once I tasted it. They suggested a 2015 Nossa Calcario Baga from the Bairrada region from a woman winemaker I very much like called Filipa Pato together with her husband William Wouters.

For a wine that was awarded an impressive 96 points by Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate it was listed at a very reasonable £12 a glass. (It retails for about £32.50 from importers Clark Foyster.

It showed the fine texture and delicacy Portuguese reds are capable of and suited the octopus very well. I also remember enjoying a baga with suckling pig a while back. It’s obviously a very good food wine.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Bar Douro.

Seabass crudo, Felsina olive oil and Meriggio sauvignon blanc

Given that I’m not a massive sauvignon fan it might surprise you that it features as my match of the week for the second successive week but it’s a question of quality. With the right dish good sauvignon is a joy.

In this case it was a starter of raw sea bass which was drizzled with Chianti producer Felsina’s 2016 olive oil and seasoned with marjoram, lemon and sea salt. And it will probably surprise you less that it was served at The River Café as part of an amazing olive oil tasting and lunch hosted by David Gleave of Liberty Wines.

Although the sea bass, herbs and salt played their part it was really the gorgeous grassy olive oil that showed off the wine, echoing its own herbal notes but bringing out its elegant citrus character as well.

These Tuscan producers only make their oils in very small quantities so you need to reserve them just as you would an in-demand wine. In the UK The Oil Merchant is a reliable source but good Italian delis, department store food halls and larger, posher supermarkets such as Waitrose should stock them in due course too. (Just make sure it's the 2016 vintage you're buying). They won't be cheap but they raise humble ingredients such as tomatoes, good bread and pasta to spectacular heights.

The best price I can find online for the Meriggio which is made by Fontodi, is £16.50 at winedirect.co.uk. Which is roughly the price you'd pay for a good Sancerre.

I attended the tasting and lunch as a guest of Liberty Wines.

Prawn tagliolini and Poggio San Polo Rosso di Montalcino

If there’s one thing you might think you could be sure of it would be that you should drink white wine with a seafood pasta dish like this. But, you know what? It was this silkily delicious red that went swimmingly.

I bought a couple of bottles of the 2014 vintage after I’d visited San Polo in Montalcino earlier this year - thinking a fresh-tasting Italian sangiovese would be just what I’d feel like drinking in summer. Friends had invited me round to sample their newly acquired skill of making fresh pasta so we had it with a great plate of homemade tagliolini with prawns (shrimp) and chilli which, despite the chilli, was quite a delicate dish.

They weren't inclined to think a red would work - and it wasn’t the sort of red that normally appeals to them but, of course, it leapt into life with the food and they absolutely loved it.

I’m not saying a fresh-tasting Italian white like a vermentino wouldn’t have worked too but it’s a predictable match and sometimes it’s fun to push the envelope. (And impress your friends ;-)

If you want to try the combination yourself you can get from slurp.co.uk for £16.99 a bottle and from Richard Granger for £18.72.