Smoked eel and potato soup with dry Moscatel

I could have picked any number of pairings from the really inspiring wine dinner hosted by Bodegas Bentomiz at Gambas tapas bar in Bristol last week but this marginally inched it.

It was a dish called Gazpachuelo which comes from Malaga - the same region as the wine - and is a traditional fisherman’s soup made with mayonnaise. (You can see it being made here)

This version was served at room temperature with smoked eel potato and scallop roe and was unctuously creamy, and slightly smokey from the eel.

With it the restaurant paired a dry, almost sherry like 2019 moscatel called Ariyanas or Ariyanas Seco Sobre Lias Finos to give it its full name that handled all the flavours perfectly. The glass was topped by a tortita di camarones, a crisp wafer with tiny shrimps which again is one of the specialities of the region - and of the restaurant.

Another terrific pairing was a final course of avocado sorbet, yoghurt and olive oil with the bodega’s best known wine, Ariyanas Naturalmente Dulce, a sweet moscatel that tasted of gloriously ripe apricots with the almost savoury dessert.

You don’t often come across such carefully thought out and imaginative pairings which included dishes that are not normally on offer at the restaurant but it really pays dividends, presenting a satisfying challenge for the kitchen and a new experience for restaurant regulars as well as showing off the wines to best effect.

Gambas is at Unit 12 in Cargo 2, Wapping Wharf, Bristol. You can buy the wines from them direct if you live in Bristol or via Indigo Wines if you're in the UK wine trade. The Ariyanas Seco is £31.90 and the Naturalmente Dulce £5.90 a glass.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Gambas and Bodegas Bentomiz

Carrot, lemon and tahini soup with Roussanne

i haven't written about soup and wine for ages - I've always felt a bit ambivalent about it on the grounds that it seems counter-intuitive to pair one liquid with another - but this is the second post in as many weeks (the other one being here)

This time it was a rich carrot soup from Ruby Tandoh’s clever new book Cook As You Are but unusual in that it included tahini and lemon. I happened to have a bottle of the South African producer Rustenberg’s 2020 Roussanne open which worked really well being quite full-flavoured itself but with a freshness that complemented and underlined the lemony notes in the soup. (I also tried a vermentino but it was too sharp so reckon an old vine chenin blanc or Cape white blend would have worked too as would a white Côtes du Rhône.)

Roussanne is an underrated grape variety that’s most often found in a white Rhône blend but has a seductively peachy character of its own. I’ve also enjoyed it with roast chicken.

You can buy this one from branches of Booths and Lea & Sandeman in London for £12.50 or online from SAwines.co.uk for £10.99 a bottle. Rustenberg does a good malbec too.

For other soup pairings check out my post on matching wine and soup

Assyrtiko and cold herb soup

As Greece’s best known grape variety you’d probably think of pairing assyrtiko with meze or seafood but as this week’s match of the week shows it’s good away from its home territory too.

The soup was one of a number of courses at one of my favourite local restaurants, Wilsons in Bristol. It was served cold and was light, fresh and gorgeously silky, topped with salted cream and a spoonful of Exmoor caviar. (I reckon it was both the slight bitterness of the herbs and the saltiness of the cream that made it so especially delicious. Being slightly saline itself, assyrtiko which is a sharp citrussy white in a similar register to albariño, likes salty food too.

It also went brilliantly with some goats curd tartlets and Jan Wilson’s ‘farm taco’ a crunchy little mouthful of home-grown herbs and something else delicious folded, taco-style, into a bigger leaf. Again, there was a bitter edge there but bitter isn’t bad - think dark chocolate and espresso coffee, both seductively bitter tastes.

The assyrtiko was a 2019 from Papagiannakos in Attica and I see you can buy it for £14.50 currently from Hennings wine.

For other suggestions with herbs see What wines (or other drinks) should you pair with herbs

Game consommé with a Croatian red

Given that wine dinners are all about combining food and wine it’s not that often that the resulting pairings blow you away but I was hard pushed to pick just one out of the four brilliant matches at last week’s Autumn Delights dinner at Adelina Yard in Bristol.

But I’m going for the first one because it’s unusual to start a meal with a red let alone pair a soup with it.

The dish was slightly more than a soup, mind you - a gorgeous broth with slivers of pigeon, tiny dice of celeriac and some delicious nutty grains accompanied by the MOST HEAVENLY truffle and mushroom brioche.

It was skilfully paired by clever Andy Clarke who was hosting the dinner with a Dimitri Brečević Piquentum Refosk*, an earthy red wine that picked up beautifully on the gamey pigeon but didn’t overpower it. And was impressively followed by a white wine rather than a red, a German Auxerrois from the Pfalz region with an equally gorgeous dish of red ‘carabineros’ prawns with a partridge boudin and heritage carrots.

The next course of Shropshire grouse with Tuscan stuffing and blackberry gel (and accompanying wicked little grouse pies) was back to red again - not the Tuscan red you might expect though but a vivid Samourai Shiraz from Free Run Juice in South Australia. Finally there was a glorious Malvasia called Vigna de Volta from La Stoppa which went perfectly with a dessert of pistachio cake, spiced apple, armagnac and prune ice cream.

So this wine dinner basically broke all the rules - red before white and unconventional natural wines throughout but was an absolute revelation. Great food too from the Adelina Yard team - one of whose founding partners Olivia Barry recently featured on Great British Menu. If you're in Bristol, go!

* You can read more about Brečević and this wine in Doug Wregg's blog on the Caves de Pyrène website.