Bacchus with asparagus with gnocchi and wild garlic pesto

With the home grown asparagus season kicking off and wild garlic in full bloom you may well be thinking of combining the two as my friend TV presenter Andy Clarke did this weekend when a group of us stayed at Wraxall vineyard in Somerset.

Andy had devised the dish to go with Wraxall’s Bacchus which it did perfectly.

Bacchus is a grape variety that does well in England. As the website Grape Britannia explains, it’s a cross of Muller-Thurgau with a Silvaner/Riesling cross, Silvaner itself being a cross of Traminer and Oesterreichish Weiss, while Muller-Thurgau is a Riesling/Madeleine Royal cross.

If you find it hard getting your head round this (me too!) just think of it as England’s answer to sauvignon blanc.

I personally liked the pairing of the delicate unoaked 2021 Wraxall Bacchus which you can buy from their website for £18 a bottle best with the assertive flavours of asparagus and wild garlic but the oaked version, which won a silver medal last year in the Independent English Wine Awards, picked up on the buttery toasted crumbs which Andy had scattered over the dish and would be a good match for richer, creamier sauces.

Anyway bear in mind Bacchus with asparagus over the next few weeks - and beyond.

For other Bacchus pairings see here 

Baba with rum

Yes, you did read that right. Baba with rum not rum baba.

It was one of the dishes that was served by top pastry chef Pierre Hermé at the Constance Festival Culinaire in Mauritius as a finale to the multi-Michelin-starred tribute dinner for chef Serge Vieira who tragically died last year at the age of 46.

Described - as only the French can - as baba infiniment exotique it was paired with a local Mauritian spiced rum liqueur, Chamarel Vanille. which undergoes a second maturation in a cask to which vanilla is added.

What Pierre had done was take the rum out of the baba and serve it alongside as a drink pairing. Which was an absolute game changer, leaving the cake much fresher and lighter. It was served on a bed of passionfruit and finely sliced pineapple and fine shards of chocolate all of which went with the Chamarel rum liqueur too.

You can buy it in the UK from Master of Malt for £36.55.

It's hard to think of a wine pairing that would have worked as well.

More food and wine matches from the festival shortly including the pairings for the Deutz trophy for which I was one of the judges.

Roast veal and Gevrey-Chambertin

My general rule is not to buy burgundy or other expensive wines on a wine list because the mark-ups are just too painful but celebrating a friend’s big birthday at Bouchon Racine in London the other day it proved too hard to resist.

We’d chosen a sharing plate of best end of veal with morels and pommes mousseline (buttery potato purée) and were looking at light reds such as Beaujolais but kept being drawn back to the higher reaches of the list. Eventually we couldn’t resist a 2021 Frédéric Magnien Gevrey-Chambertin Vieilles Vignes which sounded rather too young to drink but we hoped would hit the spot as indeed it did.

It was heady and fragrant, full of wonderfully pure fruit which showed off the delicate flavour of the veal and morels and an unctuously creamy sauce.

Sure, it would have been more affordable if I’d cooked for my friend or he for me and one of us had brought along a older bottle but then neither of us would have got our hands on such amazing ingredients and cooked them as well.

You can buy the wine from Yapp Brothers for £56 t which is obviously not cheap but not bad value for burgundy, especially Gevrey.

Occasionally it’s good just to splurge.

Shellfish, citrus and tequila

I went to an absolutely brilliant citrus dinner last week at Toklas in London, at which almost any one of the pairings could have been my match of the week.

The meal was cooked by Elena Reygadas of Rosetta in Mexico City who was voted World's Best Female Chef at the 50 Best awards last year using citrus from the Todoli Foundation just outside Valencia.

However I’m going for the first course of langoustine and scallop aguachile with Rangpur lime and Spanish sweet limetta and paired with a shot of Casa Dragones Joven tequila with clam lime.

Aguachile is a similar preparation to ceviche as explained here though made with chile-infused water but it was almost as if the shellfish has been lightly cooked in its own juices. It certainly wasn’t overly spicy in this case, more sweet and slightly smokey which really picked out the agave and other herbal flavours of the tequila.

It's not an easy pairing to replicate at home especially without access to specialist citrus though you do seem to be able to buy rangpur lime - a cross between a mandarin and a lime - online at a site called myexoticfruit.com. Sweet limetta is a cross between citron and bitter orange, according to Wikipedia.

The Casa Dragones Joven which was the most delicious, fragrant tequila I’ve ever tasted unfortunately turns out to be around £300 a bottle so I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to try it.

It's definitely an incentive to experiment more with tequila and seafood.

Another match I’d single out was a red pepper tamal with tarragon buttermilk and kumquat which was sensationally good with the ‘Cool Moon’ IGP Côtes Catalanes Les Enfants Sauvages - a blend of grenache gris, grenache blanc and macabeu which you can buy from Dynamic Vines in the UK for £42.

Again extrapolate from this that sweet red pepper and kumquat - or orange - is a flavour combination that works with white grenache or a white Grenache blend.

For other tequila pairings see Some Great Food Pairings for Tequila

I ate at Toklas as a guest of the restaurant