Sweet herring and mackerel rillettes with an aromatic Greek white

Paris isn’t the obvious place you’d think of drinking Greek wine - in fact it’s a rare sighting in a city whose wine lists are almost 100% French. So when I came across one in a hip little bar called Clamato I was intrigued

I had trouble tracking it down but it’s called Efranor and appears to come from a winery called Sklavos in an appellation called Coteaux d’Alnos on the island of Cephalonia and is a blend of Moscatel, Vostyildi and Zakynthino.

I wouldn’t have actually guessed as the Moscatel character is not that obvious and it tastes really dry but with an exotic, slightly perfumed character (the French tasting note I found says bergamot) and an almost oily texture that was just perfect with the rillettes, an unusual combination of sweet herring and mackerel with a scattering of freshly grated lemon zest. There were some watercress leaves on the side which added a nice touch of bitterness.

Admittedly it slightly overwhelmed the other two dishes we ate - a tartare of mackerel and a dish of white and green asparagus with trout roe which went better with the crisper, more mineral Le Pont Bourceau Anjou blanc 2011 from Les Roches Sèches my husband was drinking (a Chenin Blanc). But eating small plates like this you obviously wouldn’t want to keep switching wines.

I reckon a Portuguese white like a young Douro white or a Vinho Verde would have gone with the rillettes too - or a Spanish Albarino or Godello.

Roast lamb with wild garlic risotto, asparagus and feta with a chilled Languedoc red

This match, which I enjoyed at Plateau wine bar in Brighton last week, breaks a couple of wine pairing conventions. Firstly that you match red meat with a full bodied red. And secondly that you don’t drink red wine with asparagus.

But in fact the grassy notes of the asparagus and the accompanying wild garlic risotto were just perfect with this natural, slightly mineral blend of mourvèdre and grenache called Les Fainéants produced by Opi d’Aqui just outside Clermont l’Herault. As they would be with a lightly chilled Loire Cabernet Franc. (The saltiness of the feta helped too.)

I also had a lamb tagine this week with a natural red from the Côtes du Brian in the Minervois which was an equally good match. What natural wine naysayers should at least acknowledge is that fresh-tasting reds without excessive extraction or tannin are great with food.

To read about the other restaurants I visited in Brighton click here and for a longer list of asparagus pairings, here.

Sweetbreads, morels and madeira

Lots of good food and wine combinations this week but I’m picking out the one with the most unusual wine: Barbeito's Rainwater 5 year old reserva medium-dry madeira which I had at Bell’s Diner in Bristol on Friday night

It has much the same sort of nutty character as a dry amontillado but is less oxidised and a little fruitier.

We drank it with a range of small plates including salt cod croquetas but the outstanding match was a dish of sweetbreads, morels and broad beans with a rich sauce that I’m guessing had also seen a splash of madeira or sherry. Just wonderful.

Why the name Rainwater? Well there's a couple of interesting hypotheses on the Fareham Wine Cellars blog. They stock the Barbeito for £11.99 a 50cl bottle. You can also buy it from The Solent Cellar for £12.99.

Barbeito is apparently one of the more traditional producers on the island and doesn’t de-acidify or add caramel to their madeiras.

Salsa verde and Chianti Classico

Wine pairing is much more about the way you cook a dish and the sauce you serve with it than it is about the basic ingredient and so it proved with this week’s match at the recently opened Brackenbury.

It was a dish of roast skrei cod with a potato, radicchio and sage bake and salsa verde, a punchy sauce of parsley, mint, olive oil, anchovy and capers* with which the elegant young Selvapiana Chianti Rufina we had chosen paired perfectly.

There was in fact quite a lot going on in the dish that assisted the match. The fact that the cod was roasted. The radicchio and sage - both slightly bitter - and the smoothing effect of the potato but it was the tangy salsa verde that clinched it.

Note: one of the reasons it worked was because the wine was both dry and lean. The salsa would have made a riper, more full-bodied red taste much sweeter, most likely unbalancing both the wine and the match.

Obviously the wine would work just as well, if not better, if the sauce had been served with lamb or veal.

* There’s a video of Danny Bohan of the River Cafe making a salsa verde here

For my full review of The Brackenbury click here.

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