Dassai 50% unfiltered sake with lamb cutlets with Korean spices

I imagine you all know how well sake works with sashimi but it came as quite a surprise to me - wagyu aside - how well it could handle red meat and spice

This was one of a sensational series of dishes at Roka, Mayfair hosted by premium sake brewery Dassai which brilliantly demonstrated the effect of different levels of polishing rice with different dishes. The higher levels like the Dassai 23% were best with the delicate flavour of raw fish. The extra body and structure of sakes made from less highly polished rice like the unfiltered 50% supported more robust meat dishes like this fragrant, spicy lamb

I’d not come across the Dassai sakes before and was really impressed by the quality (they’re all Junmai Daiginjo grade). And I was so blown away by the food I went back for lunch with my daughter the next day!

Roka has made a major feature of its sake list which apparently accounts for 50% of its drink sales. A number are available by the glass so it’s a good place to go and experiment. They also hold regular sake and wine pairing dinners. The next ‘sake session’ is on 5th September and costs £90 a head including sake. Ring reservations on 020 7305 5644 to book. (Yes! Quaint notion. Pick up the phone! Try it!)

I attended the dinner as a guest of Roka restaurants.

Three surefire pairings for pinot noir

Most of the time, as you’ll have noticed, I feature the more offbeat wine pairings I’ve come across in my match of the week slot. This week I’ve been reminded of the virtue of some that seldom go wrong.

All involve pinot noir, surely one of the most food-friendly of reds. The first was at a sustainability event I co-hosted for New Zealand Winegrowers. My task was to pair five different grape varieties from sustainable wineries (which the vast majority in New Zealand are) with vegetarian dishes. The glorious 2010 Felton Road Bannockburn pinot noir from Central Otago which was showing beautifully, was perfect with some creamy mushroom-topped toasts with a crisp parmesan wafer. (That vintage is available at Berry Bros & Rudd for £350 a case in bond - you'll find more recent vintages elsewhere for £30-35.)

The second was at The Gainsborough in Bath where I was tasting wines from another Kiwi producer, Gladstone in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand (just next door to Martinborough). In this instance the wine was their 2013 pinot noir, a younger, more elegant wine with incredibly pure fruit, and the food a dish of roast pork loin with mushrooms, black pudding and fresh broad (fava) beans. (York Wines have it for £17.95 which is a bargain.)

And finally - closer to home at the Three Gables restaurant* in Bradford-on-Avon - a reminder how brilliant duck is with pinot noir - the twist in this case being that the pinot was Brazilian - the impressively silky 2014 Valduga Indidate pinot noir which is currently selling off the wine list for a very reasonable £28 a bottle or £8.50 a glass. That's on sale currently at Selfridges for £14.99 and imported by Berkmanns.

Useful information, I hope, because sometimes, rather than starting with the food, you've got a special wine you want to enjoy with something that will show it at its best.

The best food pairings for pinot noir

Mango shrikhand with Floris mango beer

Last week I did another pop-up with Bristol chef Romy Gill - this time at the Butlers Arms in Sutton Coldfield which is owned by Twitter friend Chris Giles and his wife Paula.

This time I took a slightly different approach, matching a beer and a wine to each dish which worked really well, proving that lager is not the automatic go-to with a curry.

Desserts were always going to prove a bit of a challenge but I suddenly remembered that Floris made a mango beer which I thought would pair with Romy’s creamy mango dessert, a simple dish of strained yoghurt mixed with fresh mango pulp. (Beer, unlike wine, can replicate the flavours in a dish without having its own flavour stripped out because of its carbonation). Thanks to the sweetness of this particular beer it worked really well and was deliciously refreshing at the end of the rich, spicy meal. You can buy it online from beermerchants.com for £1.90 a bottle.

To be fair, the wine pairing - a Concha y Toro late harvest sauvignon blanc was excellent too - the mango brought out the tropical fruit notes in the wine.

Root beer and fried chicken and waffles

I’m always on the lookout for interesting matches with alcohol-free drinks and this just inched it over a really good cider pairing at the Hang Fire Southern Kitchen yesterday.

The girls at Hang Fire were the winners of the street food category in last year's BBC Food & Farming awards and have since powered ahead, publishing a book (The Hang Fire Cookbook) and opening their own restaurant in Barry on the outskirts of Cardiff where they serve their outrageously good southern states-style barbecue food (of which more to come).

Both drinks came from fellow BBC Food awards winners: the root beer from Square Root Soda Works in Hackney which won the drinks award last year for its handmade sodas, is what used to be called sasparilla - a slightly medicinal tasting sweetish cola-style drink made from sasparilla root, burdock and licorice. Not usually my kind of thing but it was absolutely spot on with my dish of deep-fried wood-smoked chicken (whoa!) with waffles, creamy black and white pepper gravy and sweet potato fries.

The other terrific match was the ‘frickles (aka’ deep-fried pickles. NB this place is not a temple to clean eating!) and another Beeb award-winner, Andy Hallet’s rich flavourful Hallets Real Cider. Honestly, if you pop in just for that it’s worth the detour.