Glazed bacon ribs and Meursault

What do you pair with a classic Irish dish of bacon and cabbage? Guinness might the traditional answer but when the bacon is celebrated northern Ireland butcher Peter Hannan’s amazing French trimmed dry cured bacon rack, glazed and cooked on the barbecue and served with an outrageously creamy parsley sauce then something a little more extravagant is called for.

But Meursault? How does that work? Well pork goes at least as well with white wine as red but it’s really all about the sauce. Cream absolutely loves chardonnay and with a sauce of this richness a classy burgundy like the 2012 Vincent Sauvestre Meursault Clos des Tessons we drank with it* is the answer. It was just stunning.

Two other matches that worked well were a deliciously refreshing medium dry 4.5% Meadow Farm Irish craft cider and - more unexpectedly - a dark, exotic blend of nero d’avola and nerello mascalese from Cantina Cellaro in Sicily which had an unusual taste of cloves which were of course the link to the ham. Would any nero d’avola work as well? I’m not sure it would but it would certainly be worth a try.

*From Robb Brothers in Portadown

Couscous royale and 2011 Chateau Romanin Les Baux de Provence

Last week we returned to one of our much-loved haunts, Arles, and ate our way round some of our favourite restaurants (the ones that weren’t closed as a number mysteriously seemed to be at what you’d think was still peak holiday season).

One of them is a Moroccan restaurant called L’Entrevue which is now part of a sprawling multi-media centre which includes the bookshop Actes Sud, a cinema, and - rather improbably - a hammam. Instead of ordering our own dishes we decided to share a selection of starters and a couscous royale which was just as well. It was absolutely HUGE.

It includes all the meats - chicken, lamb, meatballs and merguez as well as a bowl of broth and harissa on the side to adjust the heat. We like it moderately hot - a double challenge.

Whereas I might have gone for a local Costières de Nîmes rosé with a lighter couscous with a meat feast like this it had to be a red - a deliciously mellow example from a biodynamic producer called Chateau Romanin in nearby Les Baux de Provence.

It’s a typically Provencal blend of syrah, grenache, cabernet sauvignon and mourvèdre but with 4 years of bottle age, enough maturity to soften any tannins. I can’t find it on sale in the UK but other southern French reds of a similar vintage would work too - as would Moroccan reds, which tend to be made from the same grapes.

Rabbit stew and 2011 Henri et Gilles Buisson Saint Romain ‘Sous Roche’

This isn’t the first time I’ve singled out pinot noir as a good pairing for rabbit (see here for one back in 2011) but it’s good to be reminded what an adaptable wine a relatively modest red burgundy can be.

This was a bottle we bought direct last summer when we stayed at the Hotel les Roches in Saint Romain, one of our favourite places to break our journey through France (see others here). It’s the kind of wine that doesn’t really stand out in a tasting, especially if it’s just been released but greatly improves with a couple of years maturity* and with food.

The wine, which comes from a domaine that dates back to the 12th century, comes from an organically tended vineyard of 50 year old vines. It was delicate and pretty with lovely, juicy but not oversweet red berry fruit and a fresh acidity that made it a good match for this classic French bistro dish - which is one of my husband’s specialities. It was made with a full-bodied red (and a dash, he later told me, of 20 y.o. tawny port!) but the dish, although intensely flavoured, ended up tasting quite light, showing off the taste of the rabbit. With a richer sauce I’d have probably gone for a more robust red from the Languedoc or Rhône.

It’s not widely stocked in the UK. PM Wine has the 2009 for £22.85 and fine wine specialist Christopher Keiller, the 2013. In France you can buy it online currently from Vins et Millésimes for 17.10€ (£12.44) which is not bad as I remember we paid about 15-16€ from the cellar door. In the US you can buy it for $31.99 (£20.59) from Chambers Street Wines. For other US stockists check wine-searcher.com

*they actually recommend you don’t drink it until 3 years after harvest.

Tandoori grouse and an Indian ‘SuperTuscan’

If you’d asked me a week ago whether I thought it was a good idea to cook grouse in a tandoor oven and then to serve it with a full-bodied red I’d have said no, and no. Which shows how you can continually be surprised by this food and wine pairing lark.

The dish was one we couldn’t resist trying at Trishna where Itamar Srulovich of Honey & Co and his wine buyer Dee and I had gone to hammer out the final details of our pop-up wine school this autumn. (Gratuitous plug. More details here)

Grouse is such an expensive delicacy it seems on the face of it mad to smother it in spices but the team at Trishna (who also own the much-fêted Gymkhana in Mayfair) know what they’re doing. In fact they have an awesome-looking game menu there that is matched with some really interesting wines.

The red - a 2010 blend of Sangiovese and Cabernet called Sette - is made by Fratelli, a collaboration between an Indian family-owned winery and Tuscan winemaker Piero Masi. I would have predicted that it would have been much too intense and full-bodied to accompany the grouse but how wrong I was. The rare meat and spices soften the tannins of the wine making it taste fabulously velvety.

Impressively Trishna pairs every dish on the menu with an accompanying wine. They recommend the 2013 Kloof Street Swartland Rouge from South African producer, Mullineux with the dish which would also be interesting.