Match of the week
Roast lamb and unoaked grenache
Roast lamb goes with practically any red wine you care to drink with it but grenache is a less common pairing than, say, cabernet sauvignon or tempranillo.
It might also strike you as unusual that this dish was from a dinner at Tillingham winery in Sussex who you might have thought would have had their own red but it had sold out so they’d listed this intriguing organic grenache from Domaine Julien d’Abrigeon called Coquelicot (meaning poppy)
According to Vin-Clairs, the online retailer that sells it in the UK it’s made from fruit that used to go to the great Rhône producer J Chave for whom d’Abrigeon used to work.
It’s a beautifully balanced vibrant red that wears its alcohol lightly but had the richness and structure to stand up to the red wine and rosemary jus that accompanied the lamb along with some seared wild garlic, morels and crispy potato skins (as well as mash, which delighted this potato lover!)
It was made with indigenous yeasts and very little added sulphur so basically classifies as a natural wine though it was gloriously clean and pure.
With that back story though it should come as no surprise that it costs £30.40 a bottle although interestingly it’s under £20 in the US (at K & L). Taxes on wine in the UK are brutal.
For other lamb pairings see my Top Wine Pairings for Lamb
And for other grenache pairings, The best food pairings for grenache
Bacchus with asparagus with gnocchi and wild garlic pesto
With the home grown asparagus season kicking off and wild garlic in full bloom you may well be thinking of combining the two as my friend TV presenter Andy Clarke did this weekend when a group of us stayed at Wraxall vineyard in Somerset.
Andy had devised the dish to go with Wraxall’s Bacchus which it did perfectly.
Bacchus is a grape variety that does well in England. As the website Grape Britannia explains, it’s a cross of Muller-Thurgau with a Silvaner/Riesling cross, Silvaner itself being a cross of Traminer and Oesterreichish Weiss, while Muller-Thurgau is a Riesling/Madeleine Royal cross.
If you find it hard getting your head round this (me too!) just think of it as England’s answer to sauvignon blanc.
I personally liked the pairing of the delicate unoaked 2021 Wraxall Bacchus which you can buy from their website for £18 a bottle best with the assertive flavours of asparagus and wild garlic but the oaked version, which won a silver medal last year in the Independent English Wine Awards, picked up on the buttery toasted crumbs which Andy had scattered over the dish and would be a good match for richer, creamier sauces.
Anyway bear in mind Bacchus with asparagus over the next few weeks - and beyond.
Roast lamb with wild garlic risotto, asparagus and feta with a chilled Languedoc red
This match, which I enjoyed at Plateau wine bar in Brighton last week, breaks a couple of wine pairing conventions. Firstly that you match red meat with a full bodied red. And secondly that you don’t drink red wine with asparagus.
But in fact the grassy notes of the asparagus and the accompanying wild garlic risotto were just perfect with this natural, slightly mineral blend of mourvèdre and grenache called Les Fainéants produced by Opi d’Aqui just outside Clermont l’Herault. As they would be with a lightly chilled Loire Cabernet Franc. (The saltiness of the feta helped too.)
I also had a lamb tagine this week with a natural red from the Côtes du Brian in the Minervois which was an equally good match. What natural wine naysayers should at least acknowledge is that fresh-tasting reds without excessive extraction or tannin are great with food.
To read about the other restaurants I visited in Brighton click here and for a longer list of asparagus pairings, here.
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