Dessert wine pairing: ‘Sweet Thai Green Curry’ with Lapeyre Jurancon

This wine pairing may sound difficult to get your head round - let’s face it, it is! - but it was a very clever dessert at the 3 star De Librije in Zwolle, Holland last week

Basically it was a fruit salad with Thai seasoning - mango, pineapple, sweet basil, galangal, wasabi meringues and green curry ice-cream according to my hastily scrawled notes with what tasted like a light but fiery ginger beer syrup. Served very cold on an ice pack in case you’re wondering what that is in the picture.

It paired perfectly with a light lush Jurancon from Clos Lapeyre - the 2009 ‘La Magendia’, a blend of Petit Manseng, Gros Manseng and Courbu. You can buy it in the UK from Ellis Wharton (it's currently on offer for £11.75 a half bottle), £14 from Bottle Apostle or £21.17 a full bottle from Wine Bear amongst others (see wine-searcher.com for other stockists).

Obviously this is a dish you’re not going to be easily able to replicate - unless you’re a three star chef - but it suggests that a tropical fruit salad with ginger or chilli might well work with the same type of wine.

Wine pairing: burrata, beetroot and Albarino

This week I was at Heathcotes Brasserie in Preston, Lancashire for a wine dinner for which I’d had to devise the wine matches. Paul Heathcote, the chef, is an old sparring partner and obviously thought he’d put me on the spot by coming up with some challenging dishes.

This actually sounded more difficult than it was - a starter salad of beetroot with burrata (a richer version of mozzarella) and pea-shoots dressed with rapeseed oil and - the killer ingredient - fiery horseradish which was incorporated into a whipped cream.

Now sometimes beetroot dominates a dish and tends to suggest a fruity red (like Dolcetto or Pinot Noir) rather than a white but here it was the accompanying cheese and spicy horseradish I was concerned with. And it was the start of a five course meal which needed to feature different wines so the first one couldn’t be too dominant.

I picked a crisp, clean 2011 Orballo Albarino from Bodegas la Val in Rias Baixas in northern Spain which Ironically I later found (for £8.79) at local wine merchants D. Byrne of Clitheroe* which I’ll be writing about in due course. Although it was only 12.5% it had the intensity to handle the beetroot and the horseradish and made a refreshing contrast to both.

Incidentally I love getting involved in wine events like this so if you’d like me to come and host one with you - or simply help devise the pairings - contact me about rates at fiona AT matchingfoodandwine DOT com

* Also available, at the time of writing, for £9.39 at Rannoch Scott, £9.99 at Booths and - rather cheekily - for £10.99 from Virgin Wines. Not sure how they justify that.

Pulled pork roll and a smoked Belgian-style pale ale

As those of you who follow our Facebook page may have spotted I was in France last week so you might expect a pairing with a wine from Languedoc. But no: the outstanding match, as with the previous week, was with a beer - and a rather unusual one at that . . .

It was a limited edition cloudy Belgian smoked pale ale from Arbor Ales called De Rokerij which was served at one of their two Bristol pubs, The Three Tuns.

I’d been meaning to go there for a while as they have an in-house street food kitchen called Meat & Bread which, as the name suggests, serves mahoosive meaty sandwiches.

This was actually my husband’s choice, a pulled pork roll with stout BBQ sauce for which I guess the natural pairing would have been a stout but he was intrigued by the beer which was fruity, malty with just a touch of smokiness - not nearly as smoky as a rauchbier. And comparatively modest in alcohol by craft beer standards at 4.9% ABV.

It was a brilliant match, not least when we added our neighbour on the next table’s homemade barbecue sauce which he generously allowed us to try. (Thanks, Steve)

I had the hot dog - a classic, but generous version which paired really well with the Kernel table beer I was drinking.

So I can recommend the Three Tuns both for their beer and their food. Take note they might stop serving earlier than you expect - last orders are taken at 2pm and at 9pm in the evening.

Guacamole, salsa and a citrussy pale ale

Last Friday night Helen, our designer, and I had a bit of a works outing to our colleague Monica Shaw's who works on the nuts and bolts of the website. She cooked up an amazing Mexican feast of which this was just one element but it was striking how much better the whole meal went with beer than with wine.

It wasn’t that the wine was bad. We had a deliciously limey Peter Lehmann Wigan riesling which went extremely well with the guacamole too - as did a Sauvignon Blanc and a new English rosé from Dunleavy vineyards just outside Bristol.

But the beers we had - a selection from Helen’s other clients Wild Beer Co, Arbor Ales and the Bristol Beer Factory - were just so easy with the widely varied ingredients and dishes we threw at them.

I’m singling out the guacamole (which was properly chunky) with our first and second beers, Wild Beer Co’s intensely hopped Fresh and Madness IPA because they both had a citrussy edge that went brilliantly with the lime and coriander in the dip.

We also had roast squash-stuffed tamales with mole poblano, a big roast corn and avocado salad, refried beans, stuffed jalapenos, tomato salad and homemade pickles a punchy/spicy combination which went really well with an Arbor Yakima Valley American-style IPA. (A red wine big enough to handle all those powerful flavours wouldn’t have been as refreshing)

I can’t pretend we found a beer to go with the chilli-spiked mango fruit salad and ice-creams and sorbets but we finished with a flourish with some intensely chocolatey truffles with candied chillies and the Bristol Beer Factory’s raspberry stout - an unlikely but knockout combination.

It was the big flavours in the beers that carried the day too. Light lagers and more traditional ales wouldn't have worked as well.