Match of the week
Pork and chicken pie and English sparkling rosé
You might think of pork pie as pub food, best accompanied by a pint of beer or cider and it’s true that both make excellent pairings.
But at Fortnum & Mason’s English wine tasting last week I tried a glass of their own label English sparkling rosé with their excellent pork and chicken pie and it also worked brilliantly.
The wine, which is made by top English producer Gusbourne, is quite ldelicate so actually benefited from having a bit of fatty, slightly salty pork to accentuate its fruit. (When I say fatty I don’t mean unpleasantly so, obviously, just that a pork pie by definition includes some pork fat. As does a sausage.)
Anyway I thought it would be a perfect combination to take along to a grand summer picnic like Glyndebourne - or even a not-so-grand one.
(The Co-op does a rather good English sparkling rosé called Eight Acres in their ‘Irresistible’ range if you can’t run to the Fortnums one. Or to pink champagne which would be the other, more costly, alternative.)
Indian-spiced soft-shell crab and English sparkling rosé
You might have thought English sparkling wine and in fact English wine in general was a bit delicate for Indian food but this pairing at Trishna last week was spot on.
Crab of course goes well with rosé anyway and sparkling wine is great with deep-fried food so it wasn’t a massive leap to pair the two when spices were involved especially when they were as subtle as at Trishna which has a Michelin star
The wine was one of the most elegant English rosés, Busi-Jocobsohn’s 2019 Rosé Brut which has a lowish dosage of 6.3g which counters the idea that you need wine with a touch of sweetness with spicy food.
However it is a single vineyard wine and slightly fuller and riper than the extra brut rosé of theirs I’ve tasted before which helped it stand up to the dish (and makes for more pleasurable drinking too)
You can buy it from their website busijacobsohn.com for £39 - which is good value for a sparkling rosé of that quality.
For other wine and crab pairings see The Best Wines to Pair with Crab
I ate at Trishna as a guest of Busi-Jacobsohn.
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