Choucroute and Alsace riesling

I do love a tried and tested terroir-based wine match and there’s nothing better to pair with a dish of choucroute (almost Alsace’s national dish*) than a glass of the local riesling

I didn’t come across it in Alsace though but at a wine evening last week at my favourite Bristol wine bar Bar Buvette. The guest winemaker was Marie Boesch of Leon Boesch, a family-owned producer I visited a couple of years ago and whose wines are imported by Vine Trail which is also Bristol-based.

Although they’re biodynamic they’re not at all funky, just incredibly pure, live and expressive. The 2016 Les Grandes LIgnes riesling which I’ve subsequently bought was my favourite but the sylvaner worked very well too.

The choucroute was also unusually good. It can be a bit of an acquired taste - quite sour and sharp from the fermented cabbage but this was a big hearty wholesome plate of food with a good dollop of mustard.

Bar Buvette also does a cracking tartiflette

* Yes, I do realise Alsace is not a country but it's a very different part of France that almost feels like an independent nation!

Poached salt pollock and cauliflower with Julien Meyer's 'Nature' Sylvaner/Pinot Gris

Like half the world it seems at the moment I’m a bit obsessed with cauliflower so was drawn to this dish at Birch in Bristol on Friday like a moth to a flame

It was a brilliant assembly of different tastes and textures - very lightly salted, flaky fish (who knew pollock could taste so good?), some deeply savoury sautéed cauliflower - and a few finely sliced florets - the crunch of slender shavings of radish and the richness of almond butter - so perfect with the cauliflower. It was satisfying at so many levels.

With it - and most of the rest of the meal - we drank a bottle of biodynamic producer Julien Meyer’s 2012 Nature from Alsace, an unusual and fragrant blend of pinot gris and sylvaner - and only 11.8% incidentally. I love sylvaner - it’s so fresh and fragrant - and actually applied a lovely lift to the whole dish.

You could have drunk any number of wines with it: almost any crisp not overly flavourful white such as a verdicchio or grüner veltliner would have worked well too but this was spot on.

Smørrebrød and a Sonoma County Sylvaner

I’ll be focussing on some of the more conventional wine pairings I came across during my recent visit to Napa and Sonoma later this week but here’s a really off-the-wall match I encountered in San Francisco

It was at brunch in the popular Bar Tartine in the Mission district - a restaurant that has a bit of a mittel European/Scandinavian vibe and a winelist to match but also some intriguing oddities in the way of Californian wines.

I went for a glass of the Scribe Sylvaner Ode to Emil no 11, from Andrew Mariani in Sonoma which is named after Emil Dresel who first brought sylvaner cuttings to America back in 1858. It was deliciously crisp and fruity (think starfruit) similar to some of the silvaners I was drinking in the Rheinhessen a few weeks ago.

I chose it because I thought it might stand up to the pickles we’d ordered but found it even better with a selection of open sandwiches on pumpernickel which included quark topped with lox, smoked pork with mushrooms and fried onions (particularly good with this) and kale with yoghurt and seeds (kale being very on-trend in San Francisco right now).

It even survived the smoked potatoes and potato pancake with corned beef and horseradish we ordered in the interests of - er hem - research. (Yes, we did pig out)

A grüner veltliner - and believe it or not they do have some in California - would have worked too, I suspect.

The sylvaner appears to be sold out from Scribe but still available from Domaine LA in the US. But substitute a dry German or Alsace sylvaner which should match equally well.

Rheinhessen silvaner and penne with tomatoes and peppers

I must confess I’ve never associated German wines with pasta dishes especially ones based on summer vegetables like tomatoes and peppers but then I haven’t come across many genuinely dry German wines in Italian restaurants before.

This was our lunch on the first day of my current trip to Germany at Weingut Brüder Dr. Becker who make biodynamic wines in the village of Ludgwigshöhe in the Rheinhessen.

They make a couple of silvaners - a local grape for the region - both dry: a simple crisp fruity ‘Grüner Silvaner’ and a village wine - the Ludwigshöhe Silvaner which is fermented in large wooden vats and left on its lees for greater complexity. Neither, sadly, is available in the UK at the moment.

For lunch they laid out a summery spread of gazpacho and big dishes of vegetable pasta, obviously made with locally grown ingredients. As well as the penne, which was quite piquant, there was a linguine with chanterelles, chives and parmesan. Oh, and a generous bowl of freshly made pesto to spoon over them.

The silvaners were similar to drinking dry Italian whites - i.e. a very good match. Their rieslings went well too but I’ll be posting some more thoughts on matching German riesling after the trip.