Venison cottage pie and a ‘lunchtime claret’

This week’s match is a blast from the past - a visit to the historic Rules restaurant in London’s Covent Garden where we tucked into the kind of food you’d have eaten 50 years ago - if not 100.

I hadn’t been for a long while but was inspired to book by a review in the Guardian by my colleague Marina O’Loughlin.

I was going to have steak and kidney pudding but saw this venison cottage pie being borne to another table adorned with an extravagant Elizabethan-style ruff and couldn’t resist it. It was richer than the usual beef version with shredded rather than minced meat and a wonderful golden topping that must have owed a good deal to butter and egg yolk.

The prices on the wine list are somewhat eye-watering (£15.95 for a glass of Joseph Perrier champagne!) so we made the wise decision to go with a carafe of Château le Pey cru bourgeois Médoc which they served in a rather splendid jug.

Coming from the excellent 2010 Bordeaux vintage it was deliciously ripe but still light and fragrant enough to be the perfect foil for the very rich pie - exactly the sort of wine that used to be referred to in the trade as a ‘lunchtime claret’.

The buffers at our next door table looked on approvingly (though were even more impressed by the Gin & It and White Lady we ordered to kick off our meal). Cocktails and claret are the way to go at Rules.

Oh, and Barsac which I can strongly recommend with a steamed syrup sponge. Yes, it was THAT kind of lunch . . .

Prosecco and jelly

Is there a good match for jelly and ice-cream? A dessert wine can seem too heavy - and ice cream can strip out its sweetness - but prosecco is perfect, as I discovered at the weekend.

The jelly in question - a blood orange and Campari jelly at the Seahorse restaurant in Dartmouth - admittedly had a touch of bitterness which helped. And the prosecco, Nino Franco Rustico, like most sparkling wines, had an added ‘dosage’ or sugar solution that prevented it tasting too tart. The slightly sweeter Cartizze might have been even better but what made it work so well was the combination of textures - the frothy bubbles and the gently quivering jelly.

Coincidentally we had been at a friend’s the previous night who had made a rhubarb jelly with prosecco which was equally good - and very pretty. Jelly and prosecco is the way to go for spring and summer entertaining, I reckon. You heard it here first ;-)

Tipsy cake, roast pineapple and Chateau d’Yquem

Let’s face it, I don’t get to drink Chateau d’Yquem every day so what else could last week’s match of the week be than this stellar pairing I had at Dinner at Heston Blumenthal?

It was a dessert called tipsy cake which has been on the menu since the restaurant opened. Hard to describe - it’s a bit like a superlight sugary brioche with a layer of gorgeous gooey Sauternes-laced sauce underneath and is served with spit-roast pineapple. That was the key to the match bringing out all the apricot and tropical fruit flavours in the 2011 Yquem we were tasting. The dessert is dated 1810 but I bet they didn’t produce such a delicious version as that in those days - as Heston acknowledges in this video.

As I mentioned the other day in my post on whether great wine needs to be aged as long as we think it does it was extraordinary to be served an Yquem as young as that. Instinctively it seemed like baby-snatching but it couldn’t have been more delicious.

It may be worth applying that principle to cheaper Sauternes and similar sweet Bordeaux wines. And maybe thinking of roast pineapple when you next want to create a knock-out wine pairing for Yquem should you be fortunate enough to find yourself in that position . . .

I ate at Dinner as a guest of Chateau d’Yquem.

Grosset off-dry riesling with a Chinese New Year’s Eve feast

We had a great feast with friends on Saturday night to celebrate the Chinese New Year, cooking a range of dishes from Fuchsia Dunlop’s fabulous Every Grain of Rice about which I was raving last week.

They included fiery fish-fragrant aubergines (right), beef with cumin (unusual for China), pungent dried shrimp with cabbage and a wonderfully quirky dish called ‘smacked cucumber’ which contained Sichuan pepper and chilli oil. A challenge for any wine.

I had high hopes of Jeffrey Grosset’s 2010 Off-Dry Watervale Riesling from the Clare Valley region of South Australia but couldn’t have imagined how well it would work.

It was superbly balanced with that trademark Clare Valley lime character but managed to be light (only 11.5%) and powerful at the same time and intensely flavoured enough to stand up to all the punchy flavours in the food.

In fact it was so dry I was amazed to find it contains 16g/litre of residual sugar according to Grosset's UK importer Liberty Wines. (The acidity is 9g per litre).

On the strength of that bottle I ordered six more (from Rannoch & Scott who still seem to have a few left at the time of writing as does slurp.co.uk and Australian Wines Online.

If you can find it, grab it. It’s among the best Aussie rieslings I’ve tasted, including Grosset’s own Polish Hill. The 2012 vintage, now called Alea*, is supposed to be even better.

* Possibly the 'off-dry' description may have created the wrong impression - don't let that put you off though.