Duck tagine and Moscatel

I certainly feel duck’s status as one of the best ingredients to pair with wine has been enhanced by this week’s match of the week

It was one of the main two courses at the latest session of the monthly wine club I’m running with Itamar Srulovich and his wife Sarit at Honey & Co and as ever with those two was incredibly inventive: basically a duck tagine with clementines and apricots toped with kadaif pastry - an ultra-exotic duck pie for which I hope they’ll at some point give the recipe!

It went well with a number of the full-bodied white wines we tried with it but I particularly liked it with the headily aromatic 2013 De Martino Moscatel Viejas Tinajas from Chile which is aged in clay amphorae (a pairing that makes sense when you think how well duck goes with gewurztraminer). It also went really well with an Austrian Rülander (also an orange wine), an oaked white rioja, a white Crozes Hermitage and - most surprisingly to me - a lush Newton Johnson chardonnay from Hemel-en-Aarde in South Africa

You can currently buy the 2014 vintage of the moscatel from Les Caves de Pyrène at £14.20 a bottle, Joseph Barnes Wines Direct at £15.50 and £15.99 from Handford Wines.

NB We won’t be holding a wine club in February but will be starting a new series in March. If you’d like to know when the dates and themes are confirmed send your email address to events@matchingfoodandwine.com and we’ll put you on our mailing list.

Wine and cheese: Rosemary and ewes’ milk cheese and (very) old white rioja

Last week I hosted a tasting for Wines of Rioja at Cambridge Wine Merchants. You never know quite how these things are going to work out on the day but happily most of the matches were spot on.

The standout pairing for me though was the extraordinary Lopez de Heredia Blanco 1998 - no that’s not a misprint! A 15 year old white made in an oxidised, almost sherry-like style having been aged for six years in cask. That sounds as if it might be unbearably woody but not at all - there was a sherried note to be sure but also a beguilingly honeyed character and a wonderful freshness at the end. An extraordinary wine.

I’d paired it for comparison with a younger oaked white rioja (the 2010 Amaren Rioja Blanco) and chosen a selection of tapas including almonds, ham from Teruel DO, and a delicious rosemary coated ewes’ milk cheese. The cheese and the Tondonia was just brilliant, one of those fabulous matches where each brings out another dimension in the other.

It underlines my conviction that white wine is just as good, if not a better match for cheese than red, albeit a less intuitive one.

You can currently buy the Tondonia Blanco from Cambridge Wine Merchants for £29.95, Fortnum & Mason for £29.50 and Corks of Cotham in Bristol for £28.99

Lobster and sweetcorn with Allende Rioja Blanco

I came across this pairing at a dinner to launch the London Restaurant Festival. It was held at Nuno Mendes Loft Project, a permanent East London pop-up - if there is such a thing - where he normally hosts visiting chefs of a similarly experimental bent. Mendes is one of the most talented chefs in London at the moment and normally cooks at nearby Viajante in Bethnal Green which I reviewed here.

It was an immensely complicated dish which, when quickly announced by our server, sounded like lobster, bread porridge, sweetcorn, confit egg yolk and girolles, a combination you'd never think of putting together unless you were mad or Mr Mendes. It also included a touch of chilli and fresh coriander which made it taste like an exotically spicy but rather wonderful brunch dish.

I'm not normally that keen on eggs in the middle of savoury dishes (a hot trend at the moment, it seems) but the yolk had been cooked to the point where it was firm but not hard and added another layer of unctuous richness.

The inspired pairing was an oaked white Rioja - the Allende Blanco 2008 which dealt with all the complex flavours marvellously. It was, I find, a recent Jancis Robinson pick of the week and you can read about it here. As she points out, it strikes a perfect balance between the new crisper Riojas and the more traditional heavily oaked style. Really quite lovely.

You can buy it from slurp.co.uk for £17.45 a bottle.

I ate at the Loft Project as a guest of the London Restaurant Festival and Wines of Rioja.

Roast turbot with wild mushrooms and white Minervois

I spent last week in the Languedoc where we visit quite regularly so there weren’t many new food and wine discoveries to be made but I think the most thought-provoking match was a main course dish of roast turbot with girolles and a bottle of Château Cabezac 'Alice' 2008 from the Minervois I had at a restaurant in Agde called Le Bistrot d’Hervé.

Turbot is a fine fish and this was by no means a major wine but it was in the right register. It was an unoaked blend of Grenache Blanc, Muscat and Bourboulenc - earthy rather than fruity - which suited the slightly meaty texture of the fish and richness of the accompanying mushrooms. A better match would have been a fine white Rhône such as a Hermitage or Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe, a white burgundy (or similar cool climate Chardonnay), a traditional oak-aged white Rioja or a bottle of Champagne which, by coincidence, was what the table next door were drinking with their turbot (Pol Roger, to be precise).

I bet they paid a fair bit for it. I like the food at this restaurant but the mark-ups are excessive, even allowing for the exchange rate. The Cabezac ‘Alice’ sells at €5.50 from the domaine and they’re selling it for 21€, almost four times as much.

Starters are pricey too for a bistro - between 12€ and 16€ and there’s no set menu on a weekend evening. It seems that bistrots, spelt with a ‘t’ are as little related to bistros as gastropubs are to pubs these days. Even in a small town in France.