Mezze and a Palestinian white wine

Finding a Palestinian restaurant in London is unusual enough but discovering a Palestinian wine to go with the food is beyond all expectations

However at Akub in Notting Hill which bills itself as a modern Palestinian restaurant they have both.

The wine I particularly liked was called Nadim and comes from the Tabeh winery. It’s made from the local Zeini grape and is deliciously dry, nutty and slightly herby - the perfect counterpoint to the selection of dishes we ordered.

They included some labneh balls rolled in sumac, zaatar, turmeric and Aleppo pepper, a watermelon, black olive and mint salad, a chopped tomato salad with chillies and Mafghoussa, a dish of courgettes with smashed courgettes, garlic yogurt, pine nuts and mint. Oh, and an amazing collection of breads but they didn’t really need matching.

I imagine unless you go there you won't come across a Palestinian white but there are some quite similar Lebanese whites or try a Greek Malagousia.

I ate at Akub as a guest of the restaurant.

Pistachio pesto and solaris

One of the best food pairing experiences I’ve come across in a winery is the one laid on by Hebron vineyard in West Wales.

It obviously helps that the co-owner of the vineyard, Jemma Vickers, is also a caterer and that she and her partner, Paul have a garden which produces most of the veg they serve but she lays on regular wine and ‘tapas’ tastings with which you can taste their organic low intervention wines

All the pairings were interesting but the one that particularly stood out for me was a dish of finely sliced raw courgettes with a pistachio pesto (top left) - made without cheese, with pistachios rather than pinenuts and with less basil than in the Ligurian version which made it gently creamy rather than pungent.

It worked brilliantly well with their light, fresh, citrussy almost appley 2021 Solaris which is only 9 1/2%. It’s made in an amphora and is unfined and unfiltered. (And they serve extra ingredients on the side like mayonnaise and chilli so you can see how they react with the wine too.)

They also make a 7% red from rondo - an ABV so low they’re not allowed to call it wine but it still showed really well with some slow cooked lamb and salsa verde.

If you’re in that part of Wales it’s a really charming place to visit and the vineyard where the vines are trained up willow saplings (a strategy to combat mildew) is just gorgeous.

You can buy both wines from their website for £28 and book tours and tastings via this link.

I was given a complimentary tasting and tour by Hebron vineyard.

Spaghetti with courgettes, basil, smoked almonds and Bordeaux rosé

I was sent a really unusual rosé the other day from biodynamic Bordeaux wine estate Chateau le Puy, their 2019 Rose-Marie.

Unusual because it was deep pink, almost like the traditional clairet, intensely savoury and most of all because it was a whopping 15%. You could have easily drunk it with a rare steak or a rack of lamb.

In the event I had it with something rather lighter - a dish of spaghetti with courgettes, basil smoked almonds and old Winchester cheese at the hotel I was staying at last week, The Sun Inn in Dedham and it went really well with that too - the slight bitterness of the basil and the smokiness of the almonds bringing out the sweetness of the fruit.

I reckon it would also go with a cheeseboard - in fact it’s basically a red masquerading as a rosé as well it might be given that it’s £49 a bottle (from low intervention wines).

Could you pull off the same trick with a cheaper rosé? Of course you could provided it wasn’t too sweet - I wouldn’t go for a pinot noir rosé, for example but the Wine Society has a delicious dry Bordeaux rose, the Château Bel Air Perponcher Réserve 2020 (currently out of stock but hopefully coming back in as I've only just been sent it) which is a rather more modest £9.50 and 12.5%. Or a Bandol rosé which has a bit more character and structure than a typical Provençal rosé.

See also The best food pairings for rosé

I ate at the Sun as a guest of the hotel and was sent the Le Puy rosé as a sample.

Polenta with roasted courgettes, tomatoes and basil and Bardolino

After months of lockdown it’s been such a pleasure to return to favourite restaurants like Elliott and Tessa Lidstone’s Box-E and I couldn’t have had a more perfect day to enjoy it. The food too - especially this quintessentially summery dish of courgettes, tomatoes and basil with the lightest, fluffiest polenta - was just perfect for sitting outside on a hot day.

We’d had a glass of orange wine (not on the list) with our starters so fancied moving onto a light red rather than back to a white and picked on the Raval Bardolino Classico, an Italian red that tends to get overlooked but actually hits the spot perfectly at this time of year. It was full of lovely fresh cherry fruit - we asked for it to be lightly chilled - and really matched our mood as much as the food. I’d also love it with cold meats and cheeses or with smoked duck

It’s not that easy to track down in the UK but you can buy it from a London deli and wineshop called 8 rocks for £13.75 (and, I've now discovered, from Box E themselves who have acquired an off-licence for £15).

The Raval family also has a rather glorious agriturismo if you fancy a trip to Lake Garda. Who wouldn't?

See also The best wines to pair with courgettes