Three surprisingly good pairings for sparkling wine

Last week I had three dishes that went unexpectedly well with sparkling wine - for slightly different reasons:

The first was a food and wine pairing exercise at Denbies Vineyard Hotel in Surrey where they paired their Cubitt blanc de noirs with baguette and Marmite butter which I can strongly recommend to Marmite addicts. Why did it work? The combination of the umami in the Marmite and the toasty fizz (which came from the 2013 vintage).

Then I had the most incredible dish of macaroni cacio e pepe (a cheese and pepper sauce) with deep-fried crispy chicken wings at Wild Honey St James. This was perhaps more predictable match as deep-fried foods generally go with fizz but the cheese added an extra dimension too. The wine was another English fizz - the Westwell Estate Pelegrin Brut.

And finally - this was an exceptionally good week, wasn’t it? - a cheese course at a game dinner at the Pony & Trap in Chew Magna which was essentially a giant gougère stuffed with Baron Bigod, a British Brie-type cheese with gooseberry purée and walnuts with an Etienne Fort Crémant de Limoux from Vinetrail who supplied the wines and devised the pairings. This was really quite bold as we’d just been drinking a substantial Rhône red - the Fréderic Agneray Mitan with the main course of pigeon. It was the pastry of the gougère - also crisp and cheesy - that made the match sing.

Champagne would, of course, have worked equally well with these dishes.

I ate as a guest of Denbies Vineyard Hotel and the Pony & Trap. Wild Honey St James gave me a complimentary glass of the Westwell though I paid for the rest of the meal.

Mackerel and red gooseberry juice

Pairing food with no and lo-alcohol drinks is still in its infancy, alcohol-free drinks being pretty new on the scene themselves so it was lovely to have the opportunity to run through a series of alcohol-free pairings that were offered as an accompanying flight to the tasting menu at restaurant Hjem near Hexham in Northumberland.

The most successful combination was a dish of charred mackerel with raw cream and tomato jelly which was brilliant with the gooseberry juice I had in front of me. Stands to reason when you think about it - mackerel and gooseberries go well together on the plate - so why not take away that fruity element and serve it in a glass?

(I’d say the only problem is that it’s unlikely to go as well with the subsequent course, in our case an extraordinarily luxuriant dish of peas under a brown butter foam. The same wine (a 2016 Domaine des Ardoisières Argile Blanc from Savoie) could and did handle both though wasn't as spot on with the mackerel as the juice.)

The other really good pairing was a woodruff ice-cream (woodruff is a herb with a hay-like scent as explained here) which was served with a light strawberry juice garnished with violas. Very delicious and pretty.

I hope to get round to writing about Hjem which, since it was glowingly reviewed by the Sunday Times restaurant critic Marina O'Loughlin, is not the easiest place to get into. But worth the detour as Michelin would have it.

Napoleon ewes cheese and mature white Saint Mont

It’s always a bit of thrill to come across a cheese you don’t know especially when you’re bowled over by it as in the case of the Napoleon ewes milk cheese I tasted at the Plaimont pop-up wine bar in Marciac, in south-west France last week. (It's the one at the top of the board in the picture above.)

According to the encycopaedic La Fromagerie, which stocks it occasionally, it’s a unique pasteurised cheese from the Hautes-Pyrenées “in the style of other Pyrénées ewe's milk tommes (such as Ossau) but with a softer texture and a lovely nutty tang.”

It was really sublime with Plaimont's 2015 Le Faite Blanc Saint Mont, made, like their other wines, from the relatively obscure grape varieties of Gros Manseng, Petit Manseng and Petit Courbu. It’s richly textured and savoury, slightly salty, even which works well with sheep cheese and handled the pungency of the Napoleon really well.

Corney & Barrow has the 2014 vintage for £20.95 a bottle but you could enjoy the same experience with an older vintage of the more modestly priced Les Vignes Retrouvées, the 2017 vintage of which is available from The Wine Society for £8.95 (though ideally I’d hang on to it for at least a couple of years to enjoy it with cheese,)

I visited Marciac as a guest of Plaimont.

Mezze and pomegranate juice

If you find yourself in an Iranian restaurant (or a Persian one as they often still describe themselves) you’ll be lucky to find much in the way of wine options and in many ways the food is better suited to the cordials or sharbats they would generally drink.

So when I visited Kuch in Bristol the other day I ordered a pomegranate juice which went really well with my plate of mezze which included felafel, kibbeh, sambosak and beetroot borani (a yoghurty beetroot dip)

Like most cordials it was slightly too sweet so if you’re making it at home I’d recommend adding some fresh pomegranate juice or maybe even a dash of lime juice but it’s much better suited to Persian food than the more common English options of apple and orange juice.

It works in Lebanese and other middle-eastern restaurants too.