South-east Asian seafood dishes and salads and aged Eden Valley riesling

It was a tough call to find a match of the week this week - there have been so many but I'm picking three dishes from a meal I had at a brilliant south-east Asian (mainly Vietnamese) restaurant in Tanunda in the Barossa Valley called Ferment Asian which has just picked up an award for the best Asian restaurant in South Australia

We were taken there by Andrew Wigan the chief winemaker at Peter Lehmann who brought along the 2006 vintage of his own Wigan Eden Valley riesling, a deliciously crisp, racy wine with fantastic acidity. It went perfectly with a dish of sugar cane prawns (minced prawns served kebab-like on sugar cane skewers with a kumquat, salt and chilli dipping sauce, right), crisp Hanoi spring rolls with a salad of fresh herbs and a classic Vietnamese dipping sauce and a fresh, tangy Vietnamese-style beef salad.

I think a younger Eden or Clare Valley riesling would have worked too.

Wagyu beef steak and Vasse Felix Heytesbury Chardonnay

Last night was my first in a two week trip of Australia - an informal dinner with Vasse Felix at a Chinese restaurant in Perth (Grand Palace).

It showed great confidence to choose a restaurant on the basis that it was near my hotel rather than the fact that it prepared food they knew would go with the wines. Chardonnay and Cabernet are not the obvious matches for Chinese food.

I really like the wines, most particularly the crisp, refreshing Semillon-Sauvignon (good with the salt and pepper squid) but it was the sensuously creamy 2009 Heytesbury Chardonnay that really stole the evening. And no wonder because it's picked up all kinds of gongs including the Len Evans award for best wine in show at the National Wine Show in Canberra last year. (And the 2010 vintage won the best young white wine in the Melbourne Wine Show recently.)

I thought it would go with the scallop dish we picked - a selection of scallops with black beans, chilli sauce and garlic and shallots but it was in fact the Western Australia Wagyu beef cooked with ginger, shallots and a touch of sesame oil that was the knockout match of the evening, outperforming even the Vasse Felix Heytesbury Cab.

Of course most people will always prefer a red with steak but an oaky white can do the job just as well.

Stichelton and onion quiche and Fleurie

A simple lunch of quiche from leftovers thrown together from the fridge turned into a feast with a glass of Claire and Fabien Chasselay's Fleurie La Chapelle des Bois, an organic Beaujolais from the excellent 2009 vintage.

It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking Stilton or Stichelton (the unpasteurised version I used) is so strong that it needs a sweet wine or a fortified wine like port, but in a creamy quiche, offset by onions, it will easily work with a crisp white wine or a light red like this. You also always need to take any accompanying salad into account - ours was a simple green one with a classic vinaigrette which also pointed to a wine with some acidity. This delightfully fresh and fruity Beaujolais, which you can buy for £13.25 from Vintage Roots, hit the spot just perfectly.

It seems to me there's a bit of a Beaujolais revival at the moment - I'm sure I've seen more about Beaujolais Nouveau this year than I have for a long while. And it's still huge in Paris, even among the natural wine movement, as this evocative post from Bertrand Celce of Wine Terroirs testifies. But with the 2009 vintage still around and some charming 2010s I'd stick to the real McCoy.

Pork scratchings and Nyetimber 2006

This may be a mystifying pairing to those of you who don't live in the UK but bear with me ....

Pork scratchings are deep-fried pork skin - a popular pub snack but this is crackling with a difference - a gourmet nibble devised by three Old Etonians, food writer and TV personality Matthew Fort, food writer Tom Parker-Bowles who just happens to be the son of the Duchess of Cornwall, and Rupert Ponsonby, Gloucestershire farmer, landowner and immensely posh PR.

Together they have come up with Mr Trotter's Great British Pork Crackling - a product of outrageous fattiness, saltiness and pigginess that feels like picking at a particularly delicious pork belly joint.

What to drink with it? Well I had hoped a beer, specifically the rather elegant Deus a champagne-style Belgian beer made with champagne yeast. But, fine though it is, it was too sweet. The Duchy Originals Organic Golden Ale, made for Parker Bowles father-in-law, was a better match but seemed a tad pedestrian.

What really worked though - and how appropriate - was Nyetimber Classic Cuvée 2006, one of Britain's best sparkling wines, indistinguishable, in the view of many, from top champagne.

It's a fine, full-bodied fizz but is elevated to another level if sipped with Mr Trotter's.

The kind of thing you want - and I'm sure you'll find in a few months' time - in room service in the poshest UK hotels.

Disclaimer: I should make it clear that I'm not entirely impartial in this matter. Matthew was at one stage my commissioning editor on The Guardian. And I'm rather fond of Rupe. But that doesn't detract from the fact that the match is a brilliant one.