Match of the week
Aubergines with walnut sauce and amber wine
It’s hard to pick out one pairing out of the multitude of dishes we were served with amber or orange wine during my first visit to Georgia last week but I’m going for one we barely ever failed to find on the table - grilled aubergine with walnut sauce.
Amber is the name that Georgians are increasingly using for 'skin contact' white wines which are made in qvevri - large egg-shaped clay pots which are buried in the ground. The juice is left in contact with the grape skins for a period that can range from a few days to a few months and accounts for the deep colour and exotic dried fruit flavours (often peach, apricot and quince) of many of the wines.
They are more structured and tannic than a classic white wine so pick up well on bitter and savoury flavours especially walnuts and aubergines (eggplant), both of which are ubiquitous in Georgia. The two together make the perfect amber wine pairing.
We were served this particular dish at Shumi winery and it would go particularly well with their 2017 Iberiuli Mtsvane Qvevri Dry amber wine (which you can find in a Tblisi wine shop called 8000 vintages) but other richly flavoured amber wines would work brilliantly too.
You can find a similar recipe here.
I was invited to Georgia by Georgian Wines and hosted at the meal by Shumi.
Mature Savennières with chargrilled carrots, burnt aubergine, miso and walnut pesto
OK, this pairing at Jason Atherton’s new Social Wine and Tapas isn’t exactly easy to reproduce at home but it was certainly the highlight of my food and wine matches last week.
The dish was a clever and complicated one from the vegetable section of the tapas menu (defining tapas pretty loosely, admittedly) and one of the best vegetarian dishes I’ve had in London. There were powerful smoky notes from the charred carrot and aubergine, a rich umami taste from the miso and a generous dollop of nutty pesto - quite a lot for any wine to contend with.
It was paired on the advice of the sommelier Stefan with a flight of Savennières which he’d been instrumental in putting together because one of the wines - a 1992 Roche aux Moines from Domaine aux Moines - was his birth year (gah!). It was somewhat less youthful than Stefan but hugely interesting to try. The wine of the flight that worked best was the gorgeously honeyed, peachy 2011 Les Genets from Domaine Laureau with great acidity which held its own magnificently with the different elements of the dish.
The wine flights are definitely the way to go at Social Wine & Tapas. They offer you a chance to try some really interesting wines - served in appropriate glasses or stemware. My Savennières flight was £21 which is not cheap for 225ml of wine,, but I didn’t want to drink more than that and a bottle of the Genet would have cost £35. You can buy the wines to take away, if you like them, in the small retail shop on the ground floor.
Endive, Stilton and walnut salad with blanc de blancs champagne
Champagne two weeks running? I know - it is a bit indulgent but I just couldn’t ignore last night’s extraordinary dinner at the Savoy to celebrate the trophy winners and launch of the first Champagne & Sparkling Wine World Championships. Besides it is our 400th Match of the Week - equally something to celebrate.
I’ll be writing more about the champagnes, the food and the interaction between the two but the most unexpected match was a starter salad of endive and baby gem salad with Stilton, celery, salted walnuts and honey dressing which was paired with three blanc de blancs.
Admittedly the Stilton was mild and buttery and the dressing quite light but I was still surprised by how well the match worked, particularly with two Ruinart blanc de blancs - the non-vintage which won the award for Word Champion Non-vintage Blanc de Blancs and the 2002 vintage which was nominated World Champion Deluxe Blanc de Blancs.
Interestingly in the tasting that had preceded the pairing I had been more charmed by the 2002 Champagne de Castelnau Blanc de Blancs which was still extraordinarily fresh and fragrant for a 12 year old wine but which didn’t quite stand up to the salad as well as the Ruinarts did. They were more demanding to drink on their own but revealed all their persistence and complexity with food.
Fresh walnut tart and Jurançon
With two spectacularly high profile meals last week (see my last two posts) it was hard to choose a match this week. Should it be the Crozes-Hermitage and Herdwick mutton, kidney and oyster pie I had at Hix, or the perfect pairing of Sebastian Bobinet’s 2006 Saumur Champigny 'Amateus Bobi' and pig’s trotter at Pierre Koffman’s pop-up restaurant at Selfridges? (There - I’ve told you anyway!)
In the end I’ve gone for my friend's dessert at Koffman - a fresh walnut tart and a Jurançon, Clos Uroulat 2007 from Charles Hours simply because it fulfilled the main ambition of food and wine matching, that the whole should be better than the sum of the parts.
Walnuts, you might think, are nothing to write home about but fresh walnuts are another matter as chef Skye Gyngell pointed out in her column in the Independent on Sunday this weekend. The tart was delicately nutty and crumbly, not bitter as walnuts often are but not oversweet like a pecan pie, despite the accompanying scoop of chestnut honey ice cream. It was a perfect foil for the lush, sweet Jurançon (not to be confused with the dry version, Jurançon Sec), accentuating its apricot fruit and making it open up like a peacock's tail. If you’ve got a booking at the restaurant before it closes on October 31st look out for it. Especially as it's only £5 a glass!
Image © Africa Studio - Fotolia.com
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