Roast lamb and 20 year old Columella

What to drink with a treasured old bottle of wine is one of the most frequent questions I get asked and the answer I usually give is ‘keep it simple’

At a post-tasting lunch with the Wine Society at their Stevenage HQ the other day they did exactly that serving a perfectly judged main course of roast lamb, mash and simply cooked heritage carrots and broccoli with a 20 year old bottle of Columella from Eben Sadie, only the second vintage of this iconic wine. There was also a port-based sauce but the sweetness was cleverly kept in check.

The wine, one of the original reds that put Swartland on the map, was a Syrah-dominated mourvèdre blend and still drinking perfectly. The most recent vintage - which the Society is now unable to import directly - also includes grenache, carignan, cinsault and tinta barocca but any good grenache or GSM blend would work equally well as would a northern Rhône syrah* or a mature Bordeaux.

You can buy the 2018 vintage of the Columella from Philglas and Swiggott for £94.95, an indication of how much in demand Sadie’s wines now are.

* If you’re a member of the Wine Society try the Côte Rôtie-like Domaine Cuilleron Signé Syrah-Viognier 2018 I tasted which is brilliant value at £14.95 and would age for a good few years too.

I had lunch as a guest of the Wine Society

White truffles and Boca

A full-bodied red mightn’t be the first wine you’d think of reaching for with white truffles but it works remarkably well as I discovered at a truffle dinner at Bocca di Lupo last week.

Boca is one of Piedmont’s lesser known appellation but still features its best known grape Nebbiolo, there known as Spanna, which can be blended with two other local grapes Bonarda di Novarese and Vespolina

The Tenute Guardasole Boca we were drinking was a relatively young 2017 - in order to be certified the wines have to be aged for 36 months , two years of which must be in oak - but was still bright and vibrant with no signs of age. Chef Jacob Kenedy had paired it with a dish of carne cruda, raw veal liberally anointed with white truffles but despite being 14% it didn’t overpower the dish at all.

You can buy it from Nemo Wine Cellars for £35 a bottle or £38.06 from Shelved Wine.

According to this article on wine-searcher.com it has a formidable ageing capacity. - I’d love to try an older vintage. You can find out more about the winery here.

I ate at Bocca di Lupo as a guest of the restaurant.

Carrot, lemon and tahini soup with Roussanne

i haven't written about soup and wine for ages - I've always felt a bit ambivalent about it on the grounds that it seems counter-intuitive to pair one liquid with another - but this is the second post in as many weeks (the other one being here)

This time it was a rich carrot soup from Ruby Tandoh’s clever new book Cook As You Are but unusual in that it included tahini and lemon. I happened to have a bottle of the South African producer Rustenberg’s 2020 Roussanne open which worked really well being quite full-flavoured itself but with a freshness that complemented and underlined the lemony notes in the soup. (I also tried a vermentino but it was too sharp so reckon an old vine chenin blanc or Cape white blend would have worked too as would a white Côtes du Rhône.)

Roussanne is an underrated grape variety that’s most often found in a white Rhône blend but has a seductively peachy character of its own. I’ve also enjoyed it with roast chicken.

You can buy this one from branches of Booths and Lea & Sandeman in London for £12.50 or online from SAwines.co.uk for £10.99 a bottle. Rustenberg does a good malbec too.

For other soup pairings check out my post on matching wine and soup

Salt cod croquettes and zero dosage champagne

Even after all this time we still don’t often think of champagne in the context of a meal but a brilliant Champagne Leclerc Briant dinner I went to last week at Berry Bros & Rudd underlined that we might be missing a trick.

Both the first and main courses went perfectly with the champagnes with which they were paired - the complex, honeyed 2015 Les Basses Prières with an equally rich dish of roast partridge with wild mushroom ravioli and the 2015 La Croisette Brut Zéro with a delicate dish of salt cod croquettes and courgette ‘flavours’ or, perhaps more accurately textures, as they were griddled, puréed and, I think, steamed.

The reason I picked this dish out of the two is that, the deep fried element aside, it was a more unusual combination and because it would have been challenging for most champagnes. The slight saltiness of the cod, which was also served as whole pieces, would have accentuated their sweetness - but this was so ethereal, so clean, and precise it was the perfect match.

It has to be said the champagnes, which I wasn’t familiar with, are wonderful in their own right. The vines are cultivated biodynamically but the winemaker Hervé Justin follows biodynamic practices in the winery too. You can read more about them here.

See also the best wine matches with salt cod

I attended the dinner as a guest of Berry Bros & Rudd