Match of the week
Vidal icewine with feta and honey cheesecake
It’s always satisfying when a challenging food and wine hit it off and both cheesecake and icewine undoubtedly present their problems.
Cheesecake is super-rich which calls for an accompanying dessert wine with enough weight but also enough fresh acidity to balance it while icewine is so sweet it can easily feel like overkill to even try to eat anything with it.
We were determined to showcase Sarit’s incredibly delicious feta and honey cheesecake though at our Honey & Co wine club on Sunday so took a punt on a Pillitteri Vidal icewine from Canada from - surprise, surprise - Lidl as the other dessert wines we’d tried just tasted thin with it. And it was fantastic! Luscious but not cloying.
You really should make the cheesecake* which is in their first book Honey & Co: Food from the Middle East. And buy the icewine which is a bargainous £14.99.
A word of warning - I can’t guarantee that icewine will go with every cheesecake - I suspect it mightn't if it was a toffee cheesecake and probably not with a chocolate one either but you never know. You can see some of my other cheesecake pairings here - and on the Pillitteri website. (Incidentally they have icewine festivals in Canada. How fun does that sound?)
* the other dessert shown in the pic was a chocolate, orange and pecan slice which went brilliantly well with a Tokaji
Roast venison and madeira
It was a tough call coming up with a single wine pairing last week - there were so many good ones but I’m going for this combination because it’s such a cool serving suggestion.
It was at a very glitzy event hosted by Marks & Spencer and themed around clementines (featured in this course as clementine steamed dumplings though I don’t think this had a huge effect on the match)
The venison was served with a glass of madeira which I’m guessing was probably this 5 year old medium rich then a beefy stock was poured into the empty glass. (Nice idea though I don’t think it picked up quite enough madeira flavour. I think you’d want to leave half a shot in the glass to get the full effect - or make the ‘tea’ with a good slug of madeira in it.)
I also reckon it would lend itself well to roast beef. A bit like drinking a savoury hot toddy. (As an alternative to gravy rather than with it)
* Sorry about the pic. The very jazzy lighting effects meant that the original was bright pink!
Gruyère and 20 year old tawny port
Port and cheese is one of those combinations that hardly needs questioning but there are some variants on the theme that still have the ability to surprise as I discovered when I worked my way through a selection of Taylor's ports and Paxton & Whitfield cheeses the other day.
My favourite - partly because it’s one of my favourite styles - was a 20 year old tawny with a deeply savoury reserve (in other words, aged) Gruyère (bottom right) which brought out exotic quince notes in the wine. I also liked a salty Manchego which made the accompanying, slightly retiring 2002 Quinta de Vargellas port taste of Elvas plums.
As you’d expect a 10 year old tawny was a spot on match with a mature cheddar but more unexpectedly a very young ruby port (First Estate Reserve) went surprisingly well with a Bosworth ash log - like having a rich fruit compote on the side. The only combination I wasn’t really convinced by was a spicy 2010 late bottled vintage with a creamy Brillat-Savarin which needed a wine with more acidity.
Of course this is not typically the way you eat cheese - you’re much more likely to have a selection - and in my view the 10 year old tawny and late bottled vintage styles are the best all-rounders. But it does show that if you have a decent piece of Gruyère in the fridge you can nibble it as well as cook with it. Dry oloroso, as I discovered a few years ago, is also a good partner.
I was sent the ports and cheeses to try by Taylor's port and Paxton & Whitfield cheese.
Lamb tagine with a chorizo-infused beer
It’s unusual for me to have two consecutive beer pairings as my match of the week but not surprising given that this week’s comes from an excellent beer dinner at The Bull, Highgate to mark the launch of Canadian beer and food expert Stephen Beaumont’s Beer and Food Companion
The menu was based on recipes in the book of which the most striking combination was based on a lamb tagine from chef Martin Bosley of Bosley’s Pantry in Wellington, a city which is considered the craft beer capital of New Zealand. I wouldn’t normally think of a tagine as the ideal match for beer even though the recipe includes a hefty 600ml of pale ale but the pairing with the London Brewing Co’s* Project Calavera (6.7%), an imperial mild flavoured with chorizo, cocoa, chilli and cinnamon and 'dry-hopped' with dehydrated chorizo, was just brilliant. (Beaumont also suggests Traquair House ale as a good match.)
Other pairings that worked particularly well were Alaskan Brewing Co’s Smoked porter with an oxtail soup and Stone & Wood Pacific Pale ale with a Galaxy hop-aromatized cheese - a great idea from another beer writer Lucy Saunders. You can apparently make your own quite easily with dried hops - see p 147 of the book.
I attended the dinner as a guest of publisher Jacqui Small.
*Which is based at The Bull.
Mushroom soup and Rignes Polaris Røykbokk
This was part of an expertly paired meal at a restaurant in Trondheim called To Rom og Kjøkken (Two Rooms and a Kitchen) last Saturday night.
It might seem perverse to pick out a beer when there were so many good wines on offer but the combination was perfect.
The soup was really rich and sweet - you’d almost think it had chestnuts in (maybe it did) and finished with truffle foam but the beer, a dark, smoky, savoury bock-style from Ringnes, which it turns out is part of the Carlsberg group, offset it perfectly. I’m hard pushed to think of a wine that would have worked better. Madeira perhaps but it was served as the third course of a five course menu and I’m not sure it wouldn’t have been too strong. Maybe a barbera or a nebbiolo.
It’s not the first time I’ve discovered dark beer goes well with mushroom soup - I recommended it in my book An Appetite for Ale and in the post below
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