Rheinhessen silvaner and penne with tomatoes and peppers

I must confess I’ve never associated German wines with pasta dishes especially ones based on summer vegetables like tomatoes and peppers but then I haven’t come across many genuinely dry German wines in Italian restaurants before.

This was our lunch on the first day of my current trip to Germany at Weingut Brüder Dr. Becker who make biodynamic wines in the village of Ludgwigshöhe in the Rheinhessen.

They make a couple of silvaners - a local grape for the region - both dry: a simple crisp fruity ‘Grüner Silvaner’ and a village wine - the Ludwigshöhe Silvaner which is fermented in large wooden vats and left on its lees for greater complexity. Neither, sadly, is available in the UK at the moment.

For lunch they laid out a summery spread of gazpacho and big dishes of vegetable pasta, obviously made with locally grown ingredients. As well as the penne, which was quite piquant, there was a linguine with chanterelles, chives and parmesan. Oh, and a generous bowl of freshly made pesto to spoon over them.

The silvaners were similar to drinking dry Italian whites - i.e. a very good match. Their rieslings went well too but I’ll be posting some more thoughts on matching German riesling after the trip.

Maroilles and premier cru Chablis

Visitors to this website will be used to my recommending white wine with cheese by now but I didn’t anticipate how good this particular combination would be.

I had opted for the cheese course - a generous hunk of Maroilles - at La Cour de Rémi, the hotel near the Channel we always try and visit on our last night in France and was misguidedly expecting the slightly funky Château le Puy 2007 we'd been drinking our main course to get by with it.

But in fact the premier cru Chablis we'd had with our first course - a 2010 Vieilles Vignes Montée de Tonnerre from Domaine Guy Robin was infinitely better, cutting through the rich cheese like a slice of apple.

Up to now I’ve thought you need a touch of sweetness in whites if they're to pair successfully with washed-rind cheeses but this was bone dry, though it admittedly might not have coped with a riper cheese. With those, I think you’d still be better off with an off-dry aromatic wine like a pinot gris or gewürztraminer or, better still, a Trappist beer or bière de garde from the same region as the cheese.

Still, if you don’t have any of those to hand looks Chablis will do - and probably improve with age.

Incidentally while I was looking for a link to a description of Maroilles cheese I found this very simple and delicious-looking Tarte Maroilles on the BBC Good Food website you might want to try.

Tuna Tataki and Grenache Blanc

Perfectly prepared Japanese food is not what you expect to find in the gastronomic desert of the Languedoc but this superb dish of rare tuna was a brilliant match for the richly textured white wine I drank at Côté Mas the other day.

The newly opened restaurant just outside Montagnac belongs to Jean-Claude Mas and is a major step forward for Languedoc wine tourism. He has installed a Japanese chef - Taïchi Megurikami - his marketing manager Brigitte told me, not to cook Japanese food but to bring Japanese influences and precision to the local cuisine.

The dish, which was part of a tasting plate of starters, was outstanding: a beautifully cut piece of tuna, served almost sashimi-rare, lightly rolled in finely chopped herbs and served with a julienned salad of cucumber and whipped cream with wasabi.

It was paired with the 2012 Mas des Tannes Reserve Blanc an unctuous, oily Grenache Blanc which had exactly the right texture and flavour for the soft, almost buttery fish.

At Côté Mas you can buy the wine from the shop and pay just 5€ corkage (or order it by the glass for 3€) but even in the UK it’s not a bad deal. Noel Young has it for £10.95 a bottle or £9.83 if you buy a case and Soho Wine Supply for £10.99.

Probably a good style of wine to pair with other Japanese dishes, I suspect.

I ate at Côté Mas as a guest of Domaine Paul Mas.

Pasta arrabbiata with sangiovese

What happens when you choose a wine to pair with a particular dish and the dish doesn’t materialise? Well, if you’re lucky it matches equally well.

Arrriving back in Languedoc yesterday evening (a Sunday) with all the local shops shut we breathed a sigh of relief that there was at least the local pizzeria - pulling out a robust bottle of Tuscan red, Il Secondo di Pacina 2010, to go with it.

Trouble was the pizzaria’s oven had broken down so NO pizza.

Fortunately we had some pasta - as always - in the cupboard so I made a scratch supper with a very pokey tomato sauce with a LOT of garlic, bacon, passata and a spoonful of hot pimenton which I realised afterwards was pretty well identical not only to an arrabbiatta as you can see from this recipe but to the near identical pasta sauce I made a year ago. Which goes to show either that I’m a cook of limited imagination or that it’s a super-reliable match.

You could obviously also drink other sangioveses with this type of pasta or - possibly even more appropriate - a southern Italian or a Sicilian red like a negroamaro or a primitivo - but not too modern or jammy a style