Wine and cheese: Zamorano and Sandeman 30 y.o. tawny port

Given that it’s the run-up to Christmas I’ve been tasting (yes, tasting, not drinking!) a lot of port recently so have had some indulgent bottles to hand when the cheese comes out.

This was a chance encounter between a piece of Zamorano cheese, a Spanish sheeps’ cheese I found in El Comado, a very good new deli in Bristol's Gloucester Road and a glass of Sandeman’s 30 year old tawny port .

I normally find tawnies of this age a little on the austere side but this was indulgently sweet with flavours of ripe peach and quince along with the characteristic nuttiness. It comes in a handsome wooden box* so would make a great gift for any port-lover.

You can find it for £60 in Majestic, £61.95 South Downs Cellars, £65.99 Corks Out and £89.99 from Amazon which shows you shouldn’t assume Amazon has the discounts on wine that it does on books. A more modestly priced 20 y.o. tawny would probably give equal pleasure.

Zamorano is a hard sheeps cheese from the province of Zamora, similar in style to a Manchego but rather nuttier and fuller flavoured than most of the Manchegos you’ll find in the UK. There’s some useful background about it on the Cheese from Spain site.

I also tried it with an interesting alternative to Stilton a Wrekin Blue which I blogged about in a general moan about the cost of cheese yesterday. I don’t think it went quite as well interestingly. The Zamorano definitely had the edge.

Zamorano would, of course, go well with sherry too - a dry amontillado I suggest - or a Rioja reserva or gran reserva.

* To be fair I'm not sure that all these prices include the box. But even if Amazon's does it's still a lot to pay for a wooden box!

Eggs Royale and St Austell Clouded Yellow wheat beer

I haven’t had a beer as match of the week for a while but with the British Guild of Beer Writers dinner and Dea Latis Beer and Breakfast tasting last week I could hardly have chosen anything else.

This combination edged it for me - and for the others who attended the beer breakfast tasting (Dea Latis is a group of women in the beer industry): Eggs Royale is Eggs Benedict made with smoked salmon rather than ham and, in this case, a light, lemony hollandaise sauce which paired perfectly with the citrussy beer.

Clouded Yellow is a 4.8% bottle conditioned wheat beer flavoured with spices and vanilla - St Austell's take on a witbier. (It’s generally served clear but you can enjoy the last remants cloudy by swirling the beer in the glass.)

It’s a very summery brew and a very suitable one for breakfast - or rather brunch. We didn’t get stuck in, you’ll be glad to hear, until 10.30!

According to the St Austell site it also goes particularly well with Thai curry and you could, of course, drink other witbiers with an eggs royale or straight smoked salmon on its own.

To read about the other contender for match of the week at a highly unusual champagne dinner click here.

Fonduta with white truffles and Barbera d’Alba

There’s only one pairing I could focus on this week given that I was in Piemonte and that is white truffles. What was the best match? Incredibly hard to say!

There were so many amazing ones - tajarin, the fine, intensely eggy pasta, carne cruda (the Piedmontese version of steak tartare) and a ‘timballo’ of autumn vegetables and truffles among them - but the one I think I’ve got to go for is the fonduta, a wonderful rich eggy fondue lavishly scattered with truffle shavings we had at Trattoria della Posta at Monforte d’Alba which I reviewed here.

I remember I picked out almost exactly the same dish six years ago when I last visited Piedmont though then we had it with one of the local white wines, a Roero Arneis - maybe because the dish also included cardoons.

It is, however, more usual for the Piedmontese to serve a young red wine with a white truffle dish, most commonly a Barbera or a Dolcetto rather than the Barolo I suggested back then. (Barolo would work equally well though they tend to save it for the main course). This time we drank a 2009 Barbera d’Alba Codamonte from Giuseppe Mascarello.

You could, of course, drink white wine with truffle dishes especially with carne cruda - with which we had a rich Gaja Chardonnay. And champagne though that’s obviously not traditional in the region.

Chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble and Bayonne ham with white Bairrada

I’m having a bit of thing about Portuguese wine at the moment - it’s so great with food and such brilliantly good value. Especially on restaurant wine lists where it’s invariably underpriced in comparison to better known wine producing countries and regions

So I zoomed in on the Filipa Pato Enscaios Branco Bairrada 2012* when I spotted it on the Grainstore list the other day hoping it would go with the very different flavours and textures of the dishes we’d ordered.

It did but I think this was the best match: a warm salad of chargrilled endive, hazelnut crumble, prune vinegar (didn’t pick that up) and Bayonne ham with a nicely judged combination of sweetness, bitterness, nuttiness and umami which played beautifully with the lushness and richness (but dryness) of the wine, a blend of Arinto and Bical.

It was also good with my more raw-tasting starter of sprouting beans and seeds, miso aubergine and crispy chicken skin which I guess had a fair amount of umami too.

(The menu matches the endive dish with one of the house cocktails - a green tomato Margarita which I must say sounds unlikely. Maybe the numbers have slipped out of sync. Then again maybe not. I need to go back to find out - at least that's my excuse.)

*Happily it's available at Oddbins at £11.75

For my review of Grainstore click here though I did encounter a couple of less successful dishes this time.