Venison tartare with Mountford's The Rise 2009 pinot noir

As you can imagine I’ve been drinking a fair amount of pinot noir in New Zealand this week (it’s a hard life). In general Kiwis pair it with lamb for obvious reasons but the most striking match I came across was with a venison tartare at the North Canterbury forage, a fabulous event I’ll be writing more about in due course

The idea was to collect as many wild ingredients as possible then hand them over to a group of chefs to create a free feast paired with the local Waipara wines. Somewhere along the line someone had picked up a deer (I don’t think they actually managed to shoot it) and one of the chefs, Tom Hishon from Orphans Kitchen in Auckland used the heart and loin to make a tartare to which he added elderberries and served with a flaxseed cracker topped with the venison bone marrow.

We got the chance to taste some of the wineries' more mature pinots with it. The wine in my glass was a silky 2009 called The Rise from a winery called Mountford. I might have thought of pairing it with cooked or seared game but not with a tartare but both the dish and the match were sensational.

Incidentally the chefs cut wooden 'plates' to serve the dish from a handy tree. I suspect just as an excuse to use a chainsaw ....

Crispy chilli lime squid with edamame bean and coriander salad and pinot gris

Having picked up a heavy cold a couple of days before flying to New Zealand last week I arrived unable to taste a thing but this delicately pretty wine from Brick Bay Winery in Matakana managed to penetrate the fog.

It undoubtedly helped to have drunk it at an outdoor table at the winery cafe underneath their pinot gris vines.

It went perfectly (I’m pretty sure) with my dish of crispy squid and edamame bean salad and I suspect would have gone equally well with my neighbour’s chicken salad*.

Although sauvignon blanc still totally dominates the New Zealand wine scene pinot gris appears to be becoming increasingly popular, not least because of its versatility with food.

* Undoubtedly true - I had a similar Asian-style chicken salad with a pinot gris at Wairau River in Marlborough which was equally good.

Japchae and a Happy Ending cocktail

I really think there are some cuisines that work better with cocktails than wine and Korean is one of them as I was reminded at the opening of celebrity chef Judy Joo’s JinJuu last week

The cocktail was a saucily named Happy Ending (if you don’t know why that's dodgy check here), a refreshing, orangey blend of Absolut Mandrin, Cranberry Juice and club soda.

It went brilliantly well with the food at the launch including crab cakes and mini bulgogi-style burgers but particularly with a spicy noodle dish called Japchae which consists of sweet potato noodles with stir-fried vegetables and a punchy soy and sesame sauce.

You could try a wine like a torrontes or gewurztraminer with it but the sweet orange flavour of the cocktail works so well.

Poached salt pollock and cauliflower with Julien Meyer's 'Nature' Sylvaner/Pinot Gris

Like half the world it seems at the moment I’m a bit obsessed with cauliflower so was drawn to this dish at Birch in Bristol on Friday like a moth to a flame

It was a brilliant assembly of different tastes and textures - very lightly salted, flaky fish (who knew pollock could taste so good?), some deeply savoury sautéed cauliflower - and a few finely sliced florets - the crunch of slender shavings of radish and the richness of almond butter - so perfect with the cauliflower. It was satisfying at so many levels.

With it - and most of the rest of the meal - we drank a bottle of biodynamic producer Julien Meyer’s 2012 Nature from Alsace, an unusual and fragrant blend of pinot gris and sylvaner - and only 11.8% incidentally. I love sylvaner - it’s so fresh and fragrant - and actually applied a lovely lift to the whole dish.

You could have drunk any number of wines with it: almost any crisp not overly flavourful white such as a verdicchio or grüner veltliner would have worked well too but this was spot on.