Fish stew and an oaked Valencian white wine

As those of you who follow me on instagram will know I’ve been in Valencia for the past two weeks, trying to improve my Spanish which hasn’t left a great deal of time for considered food and wine pairing but this was a great match at a restaurant called Rausell in the city centre.

The dish was called suquet de pescadores, a 'fishermens' stew' with hake (I’m guessing), clams, mussels and deliciously soft potatoes in a rich saffron-spiked broth. There was probably some tomato in there too and some very good fish stock.

As in many of the other Valencian restaurants I went to they didn’t have a local wine by the glass but very nicely opened a bottle of a rich oak-aged white called Blanc d’Enguera, a blend of chardonnay, verdil, sauvignon blanc and viognier (which they very generously topped up while only charging me for the glass which was only 4 euros anyway). Viognier generally goes with saffron so it was an excellent match.

There’s a YouTube video here (in Spanish!) if you want to have a go at making a similar dish.

The 2022 vintage I tasted doesn’t seem to be available in the UK or US (though it is in Germany if you check out wine-searcher.com but you can buy it direct from the producer’s website. 

Fideuá and Bobal

You might know Valencia best for paella but in fact it has another paella-like dish called fideuá pronounced fi-de-wah which is made with pasta rather than rice.

As opposed to the classic Valencian paella which contains chicken and rabbit it’s almost always based on seafood, generally prawns and squid with tomato and sweet (dulce) pimenton.

You might think that would make it a better pairing with a white wine than a red one but the locals drink red with it, not always a red from the region (Valencia or Utiel-Requena) as Rioja and Ribera del Duero are popular here. But the local grape variety Bobal which is fresh, fruity and cherry flavoured - not unlike a Valpolicella - is a particularly good match.

I had a home-cooked fideuá at a local winemaker called Bruno Murciano with a couple of their wines - of which I think the fresh, vibrant 2022 Cambio de Tercio worked best although their very elegant El Sueño which isn’t currently available in the UK is my overall favourite of their range*. You can buy the Cambio de Tercio from Ultracomida for £15.95

There’s a recipe for fideua here if you want to give it a try yourself. The secret according to this post is a really good fish stock.

*I made Bruno Murciano's L’Alegria my wine of the week a couple of years ago.

I lunched with Bruno and José Luis as their guest

Sausage rolls and orange chardonnay

I admit orange wine is the last pairing I would have thought of with a sausage roll. Especially a high-end orange wine like Radikon’s.

But credit to Guy Field, the manager of the new Farm Shop wine bar for suggesting it.

Farm Shop is an upmarket food shop in South Audley street with a surprisingly large but cosy wine bar underneath with over 200 wines, many by the glass.

The current list includes the Radikon Slatnik orange chardonnay from the Friuli region of north-east Italy  at £13.50 a glass which is not unreasonable given the average retail price is around £45-48 - rather more from the Farm Shop but we are talking Mayfair.). It’s an intensely rich wine - quite unlike any chardonnay you’ve ever tasted - and utterly delicious. If you’re out of London you can order it online from Buon Vino.

We drank it with the wine bar's take on a ploughman’s (above) which also included ham, cheddar, pickles and a terrific scotch egg and it was a really excellent pairing almost in the way a strong, artisan cider would have been although I hasten to say it didn’t taste remotely cidery. It would work well with other pork dishes too including roast pork

I ate at the bar as a guest of Art Farm.

Bagna Cauda and Arneis

I could have chosen any one of the pairings at the ‘An A to Z di Vini Divini’ wine dinner at Bocca di Lupo last week as my match of the week but this is one of the most useful ones as bagna cauda, an anchovy, garlic and olive oil dip with raw vegetables isn’t the easiest dish to pair.

The dinner was a collaboration between one of my favourite food writers, Rachel Roddy and chef Jacob Kenedy - a six course menu with really interesting wines chosen by Bocca di Lupo’s sommelier Phill Morgan.

Bagna cauda is a speciality of Piedmont so it was appropriate to drink a white wine from the region with a 2022 Arneis Le Tre from Malabaila di Canale. You can buy it from the St Andrews Wine Company for £15.95 and $21.99 at Perrine Wine Shop in Atlanta.

Sometimes the dish can be quite punchy* but Rachel’s version contained milk butter and cream which really showed off the wine’s delicate aromatic character.

You can find the recipe in the charmingly illustrated booklet they’ve produced to go with the promotion which you can buy from their website for £6.99 with £1 of the cover price going to the children’s charity Magic Breakfast. You can try the pairings individually or as a tasting menu until the end of January.

*In which case you might want to drink a fruity young Dolcetto with it as Marc Millon recounts in this lovely post 

For other anchovy pairings see The best wine pairings for Anchovies.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Bocca di Lupo.