Margaux and Turkish chicken with walnut sauce

There’s nothing I love more than a surprise when it comes to food and wine pairing and I would not in a million years have predicted that a pukka Bordeaux would go with this exotic Turkish dish.

I - and probably you - would more commonly stick to classics like roast beef and lamb with a bottle of Chateau Labégorce Zédé Margaux 2005 but untroubled by convention my friend had cooked an intriguing dish of chicken with a thick walnut sauce. It was the rich earthiness and slight bitterness of the walnuts that set the wine off to perfection. It became even more velvety and plummy - an absolute treat.

She didn’t have a recipe - she’d more or less made it up - but I’m thinking it’s probably quite like this recipe from Sabrina Ghayour. Anyway I’m going to try it. The only thing you’d need to be careful about is the kind of sides you put with it. We had simply cooked vegetables from the garden which I think assisted the match rather than exotic Turkish vegetable dishes and salads

Sadly the wine no longer exists. The estate decided not to bottle it separately from 2009 according to this report from Decanter but there seem to be a fair few old vintages knocking around if you can find them at fine wine retailers such as Crump. Richmond and Shaw (and I suspect traditional country wine merchants)

Goosnargh duck and elderberries with a Canary Islands red

Visiting two gastronomic restaurants that offered food and wine pairing in the Lake District last week (Forest Side and Hipping Hall) I’m struggling to pick out the stand-out match but I think it has to be the fabulous combination of the local Goosnargh duck with a wine I hadn’t tried before - the 2015 Tajinaste Valle de la Orotava from Tenerife that was served as part of the tasting menu at Hipping Hall.

The duck - which was fabulously tender - was simply served with elderberries and hay-baked turnip, the elderberries being the dominant note which chimed in with the lively peppery wine. The wine comes from an estate of the same name (Tajinaste is an indigenous flower), some of whose vineyards go back to 1914. It’s made from the local Listan Negro and retails at £15.99 from Hay Wines.

Other matches I was struck by were a white Dao with a dish of warm smoked beets and sheeps’ curd, and a delicate English white, Limney, from Davenport Vineyards with a dish of glazed monkfish and grilled cos. (Forest Side paired beetroot with an exotic Xinomavro rose from Domaine Ligas in Pella Greece)

If you're into food and wine pairing these are terrific places to visit.

I stayed at Forest Side and Hipping Hall as a guest of the hotels.

Pumpkin ravioli and sparkling albarino

Having ended up unexpectedly in hospital last week I struggled a bit to find a match of the week. Water doesn’t make the most inspiring pairing for food although it (the food in hospital) isn't by any means as bad as it used to be. So I’ll tell you about the the dish I had before I was taken ill.

It was a guest lunch at The Seahorse in Dartmouth cooked by Angela Hartnett and featured one of her wonderful silky pastas - ravioli stuffed (I vaguely recall) with pumpkin and hazelnuts and scattered with lavish amounts of parmesan.

I wouldn’t say it was the perfect match with the glass of sparkling albarino I was drinking, an ultra-dry Albarino Brut Nature, from Mar de Frades which was probably designed to go with the antipasti but it was certainly good enough. I also loved the intelligent wine list which is divided up by price.

If you want to try Angela’s food - and you should - visit one of her Cafe Muranos in London in St James’s Street and Covent Garden. Or Murano itself though that's quite a bit more expensive.

Peruvian-style scallops and Rioja rosado

I thought it was pretty brave of rioja producer Ramon Bilbao to present their wines at a cutting edge Peruvian restaurant last week. Still, everyone knows rioja goes with Spanish food so why not? You never make new wine pairing discoveries if you don’t push the envelope.

The restaurant was Lima, a modern Peruvian restaurant that is owned by the chef Virgilio Martinez who is ranked 4th in the World 50 Best List. It also has a Michelin star.

The food is not particularly spicy but full of vibrant colours and flavours - this scallop dish of raw scallops with tigers milk and passionfruit sounds like one of those nightmare combinations that shouldn’t work but was absolutely delicious.

It was paired not with a white but their top level Lalomba rosé which as it happens I’d put in my top 30 gastronomic rosés in Decanter a couple of months ago. It’s very clean, fresh and elegant without any overtly fruity flavours and suited the dish perfectly.

Other wines that showed well were the Ramon Bilbao Sauvignon Blanc from Rueda which went with a starter of quinoa with sweet potato and fresh cheese and a really fabulous Andean potato stew with seaweed. The fresh-tasting Ramon Bilbao Vinedos de Altura rioja 2014 was also perfect with a dish of suckling pig.

It can’t have been easy to make the pairings work so successfully so all credit to the chef Robert Ortiz for tailoring his food so well to the wines.

I ate at Lima as a guest of Ramon Bilbao.