Roast lamb and 20 year old Columella

What to drink with a treasured old bottle of wine is one of the most frequent questions I get asked and the answer I usually give is ‘keep it simple’

At a post-tasting lunch with the Wine Society at their Stevenage HQ the other day they did exactly that serving a perfectly judged main course of roast lamb, mash and simply cooked heritage carrots and broccoli with a 20 year old bottle of Columella from Eben Sadie, only the second vintage of this iconic wine. There was also a port-based sauce but the sweetness was cleverly kept in check.

The wine, one of the original reds that put Swartland on the map, was a Syrah-dominated mourvèdre blend and still drinking perfectly. The most recent vintage - which the Society is now unable to import directly - also includes grenache, carignan, cinsault and tinta barocca but any good grenache or GSM blend would work equally well as would a northern Rhône syrah* or a mature Bordeaux.

You can buy the 2018 vintage of the Columella from Philglas and Swiggott for £94.95, an indication of how much in demand Sadie’s wines now are.

* If you’re a member of the Wine Society try the Côte Rôtie-like Domaine Cuilleron Signé Syrah-Viognier 2018 I tasted which is brilliant value at £14.95 and would age for a good few years too.

I had lunch as a guest of the Wine Society

Salt-aged Glenarm Shorthorn with a mature South African syrah blend

Showing off a mature bottle of red is usually a question of keeping it simple but it adds an extra dimension if you can serve the perfect cut.

I’ve written before about Pete Hannan’s salt-aged Glenarm Shorthorn beef (in fact a couple of you have been lucky enough to win one of his fabulous meat hampers). It has an incredible savoury depth of flavour plus a slight salinity from the salt ageing that shows off a good red to perfection.

I had a 2012 vintage of La Motte’s Hanneli R*, a blend of syrah (from two different sites in Elim and Franschhoek), grenache and petit sirah which I’d been meaning to try for a while and it really was the perfect moment to enjoy it. Every element was beautifully balanced and integrated which was impressive given it had been aged in oak for 40 months* (So impressed was I by the pairing that I tried it again to equal effect with Samantha O'Keefe of Lismore's 2016 syrah on New Year's Eve. You may have read that her home and vineyards were devastated by fire just before Christmas. All the more reason to support her in any way you can by buying and drinking her wine)

Too often I think we drink new world wines, especially the more expensive ones, way too young. We really should tuck them away and hang on to them.

See also The best wine pairing for steak

* The current vintage - although it appears that it's only available in South Africa - is the 2013 but you could obviously drink a mature Rhône red to equal effect.

Coffee and maple syrup-brined pork with Saint Joseph

Occasionally a wine pairing comes along that you simply don’t expect. Invited to a barbecue at the weekend, I took along some reds I’d been tasting which I frankly wasn’t sure would go with the sweet marinades you generally encounter at a BBQ.

I had highest hopes of a soft ripe unoaked Douro red that I thought would hit the spot and the lowest expectations of a classy 2014 Domaine du Monteilet Cuvée du Papy Saint Joseph but it was so delicious I wanted to share it anyway.

It turned out that the centrepiece of a barbecue was a joint of pork which had been brined by our host food writer Genevieve Taylor in a mixture of coffee and maple syrup and therefore had a touch of bitterness that chimed in perfectly with the peppery syrah. (There was also a creamy side dish of butter beans and courgettes instead of sharply dressed salads which helped.) The Douro red tasted flabby by comparison.

It goes to show that with barbecues - as with any other type of cooking - it’s the flavours you put with your base ingredient that tend to determine the success of the pairing. And - hooray! - that you needn't wait for a dinner party to consume your favourite wines.

Incidentally you can buy the wine for £22.59 from D Byrne of Clitheroe and £22.99 at allaboutwine.co.uk

See also

What's the best type of wine for a barbecue

Seafood pizza and Craven The Firs Syrah

A full-flavoured red and seafood? Doesn’t sound like the kind of pairing that would work but as ever it depends on the wine and how the dish is prepared.

The pizza was one of a range of gourmet pizzas at a great little restaurant called Burrata at The Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock, Capetown we visited on Friday night with a couple of winemakers, Mick and Jeanine Craven of Craven Wines (Mick also makes wine at Mulderbosch) and Gavin Bruwer of B Vintners who also makes the Raats Family wines.

I ordered a di Mare (prawns, squid and chili aioli) just because I was curious to see what it was like. Thanks to the garlic it was quite punchy so easily able to handle a red.

The syrah (a 2015 and definitely a syrah rather than a shiraz) was Mick and Jeanine’s, a really delicious bright juicy example with a good whack of the white pepper and spice that characterises wines from the northern Rhône. Amazingly it was only 12.5%, which is typical of a trend to lower alcohol wines among the new generation of South African wine producers (though Mick is in fact an Aussie!). Apparently it’ll be hitting the UK sometime in the spring.