Salt cod with ciambotta di peperoni and 2004 Argentiera, Bolgheri Superiore

Another interesting insight on pairing red wine and fish in Tuscany this week. We were served lightly salted cod with a rich tomato and pepper stew called ciambotta at Tenuta Argentiera which proved a perfect match for the mature 2004 vintage.

Like other wines in Bolgheri, the wine is a Bordeaux blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc but quite different in character from similar blends in the Bordeaux region which I’m not sure I’d pair with a tomato sauce at all. Much warmer, richer and sweetly mellow.

The dish was part of a buffet during which five different Argentiera wines were served with a wide range of dishes from crudo di pesce (raw seafood salad) to grilled ribeye to cheese.

As I’ve remarked before, Tuscans consider it perfectly normal to drink red wine right through the meal even though many producers now make some attractive whites and rosés.

We had a similar pairing in a trattoria called Cibreo in Florence - a dark, dense dish of squid cooked in red wine with a 2006 Stielle supertuscan (a younger vintage than is currently available on the UK market)

After a couple of days in Tuscany drinking rich full-bodied reds with fish seems quite normal.

*Here are the details of the current 2008 Argentiera

Rhubarb cheesecake and 2007 Peller Estates Cabernet Franc Ice Wine

With four days in Edinburgh and three at the Ballymaloe Food & Drink Litfest in Co Cork this weekend I’ve been overwhelmed with good food and drink matches but as I haven’t singled out a dessert for a while I’m making Tom Kitchin’s Rhubarb cheesecake my hero dish this week.

Frankly I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t serve cheesecake with rhubarb. It’s the most perfect combination, especially with a scoop of rhubarb sorbet.

I confess I’d never have thought of pairing it with a red Canadian icewine so full marks to the sommelier at The Kitchin for coming up that one. It was paler than you might imagine for a red wine with more than a hint of strawberries and rhubarb itself which worked really well with the cheesecake. And the intense sweetness and viscosity dealt with the sorbet which can kill lighter dessert wines.

The 2007 doesn’t seem to be available but you can buy the 2008 from Slurp for £15.35 a quarter bottle or the 2010 vintage for £41.99 a bottle from Invinity wines (see wine-searcher.com for other stockists)

Not cheap but a real show-off pairing!

Brill with oxtail and Domaine Tempier Bandol

About the most unlikely wine match you could imagine - a delicate fish with a 19 year old red wine - but it worked! Which shows you can always be surprised by food and wine pairing.

It was at Bell’s Diner in Bristol and a very bold surf’n’turf dish. The key to the match was the accompanying braised oxtail which was subtle enough not to overwhelm the fish but robust enough to call for a red rather than a white.

You wouldn’t want to drink even a mature wine like this with brill on its own or with much lighter accompaniments, obviously - or at least I wouldn’t. And a younger Bandol or mourvèdre would have certainly overwhelmed the dish, even with the oxtail.

I’ve written about this Domaine Tempier vintage before. It’s a favourite wine and when we had it at The Nobody Inn last summer we bought two extra bottles, one of which we demolished at this dinner. (We had the opportunity to bring our own wine).

A wine that can work with steak and ale pie AND with white fish. Now that is something!

Slow roast pork belly with a ‘Gardener’s Old Fashioned’

Pork and apple is, of course, a match made in heaven but the pairing was taken to new heights for me by mixologist Jack Adair Bevan of The Ethicurean who invented an Old Fashioned cocktail with a twist to go with a dish of slow roast pork.

The recipe had a few clever bells and whistles of its own. The Saddleback pork had been roasted for 12 hours to a fall-apart texture and was accompanied by pickled shitake, apple and chipotle crackling salt (pulverised pork crackling, seasoned with chipotle)

But the drink was something else - an Old Fashioned made with 3 y.o. Somerset cider brandy infused with toasted oak chips, and stirred with toffee apple syrup left over from the restaurant’s signature toffee apple cake, vanilla (to make the brandy taste more like a bourbon), Angostura and orange bitters and a chipotle tincture - served with an apple and chipotle tuile. Rich, appley, spicy and utterly delicious

Normally I’m not mad about cocktail dinners - too much alcohol, too much sweetness - but where the cocktails are made from ingredients produced in the same kitchen as the food and designed to go with a particular dish it just seems a seamless extension of the menu.

Jack and his colleagues chefs Matthew and Iain Pennington have a really lovely book coming out next month called The Ethicurean Cookbook where you can find most of their recipes (except the pork and the toffee apple cake - drat!) and a lot about their preserving, curing and smoking techniques. There's a really nice video which explains their philosophy on YouTube.