A model wine-pairing experience in Mendoza

On my last day on Mendoza I had one of the most sophisticated winery restaurant pairing experiences I’ve ever come across, quite worthy of the Napa Valley. Ironically it was at Ruca Malen, who made the Malbec I enjoyed at Don Julio in Buenos Aires in Mendoza on the first day of the trip.

The winery, a comparatively recent one which was founded in 1998, was set up by two former employees of Domaine Chandon and makes a classy range of wines which are stocked in the UK by Corney and Barrow.

The restaurant serves a set 5 course tasting menu, four of which are paired with a different wine. That sounds a bit heavy for lunchtime but the first two courses are canap sized and served with small tasting glasses.

Fresh cheese terrine with olive oil and citrus gel and Granny Smith apple with Yauquen Chardonnay 2007.
Yauquen (the word apparently means ‘Let’s drink together’) is Ruca Malen’s entry level range but a definite cut above most wines at this sort of price point. The chardonnay was unoaked, fresh and citrussy with a touch of apple that was accentuated by the pairing. Sometimes flavours in a wine can be knocked out if they are mirrored in a dish but not here. No more than a bite but a great way to kick off.

Cured beef rolled with country dough with a malbec and plum compote with Yauquen Malbec 2007
Another well-judged canape - basically a modern twist on an empanada - to show off an forward fruity style of Malbec that reminded me of a Dolcetto. Again adding the little touch (not too much) of red fruit compote accentuated the fruit in the wine

Four cereals sald with fresh peppers and black olives with Ruca Malen Petit Verdot 2007
It’s one of the aims of the restaurant to reflect local dishes and ingredients, hence this combination of quinoa, amaranth, wheat and barley in a slightly spicy dressing. Grains like this can often perform a similar function to meat in softening and rounding out tannins which made the dish a great match with the exotic dark fruits of the Petit Verdot. A clever and original match

Grilled lomo steak with crushed potatoes and salsa criolla with Ruca Malen Cabernet Sauvignon 2006
Anyone with any experience of putting food and wine together could of course come up with this match of steak and Cabernet Sauvignon but the chef Lucas Bustos used the salsa, especially the green pepper, to enhance the elegance and structure of the wine, one of the best Cabernets I tasted on my trip. Their top end Kinien Malbec 2007 which is not yet released obviously worked too but to be honest I thought the Cab had the edge.

There was then a Malbec and Yerba Mat sorbet which acted as a palate cleanser and an outrageously rich dessert of Dulce de Leche and cream cheese with which they sensibly didn’t attempt to pair a wine. It was actually far too rich for most dessert wines. If forced to come up with a pairing I’d have gone for a tawny port, a brandy or a coffee liqueur (Kahlua rather than Tia Maria)

Main image credit: German El Sauki from Pixabay

Matching Lebanese food and wine

Many of us are familiar with Lebanon’s rich culinary heritage, courtesy of the Lebanese diaspora and food writers such as Claudia Roden and Anissa Helou. Yet the prevalence of popular Lebanese dishes such as tabbouleh and hummous in our supermarkets is not yet matched by Lebanese wines despite a long history of grape cultivation dating back to the Phoenicians.

The answer to this curious paradox lies perhaps in the small volume of wine produced in this tiny country of 4000 square miles as well its recent turbulent history which has often disrupted wine production and export.

The country’s top producers are out to remedy this lack of awareness, a recent example being a lunch I attended just before Christmas at the Lebanese restaurant Fakhreldine, pairing typical Lebanese dishes with wines from one of Lebanon’s oldest producers Château Ksara.

The typical Lebanese meal starts with a selection of hot and cold mezze (see photo above) which can encompass many different flavours. With them we were offered a selection of Ksara’s wines - their Blanc de Blancs 2006, Sunset Rose 2007 and red Réserve du Couvent 2006. I thought the rosé would match the mezze best, but was surprised to find that wasn’t the case. The panoply of flavours in the mezze - most notably garlic, sumac and citrus - interfered with the rose’s fruitiness leaving it rather overwhelmed.

The mezze included a luscious, smooth hoummos, smoky baba ghanoush, tabbouleh with lots of parsley (as it should be), crisp falafel, and stuffed vine leaves. warak inab. More unusual offerings were kibbe mekliyeh, a pumpkin and spinach pastry and spinach and sumac fatayer. Overall my favourite wine to pair these mezze was the fresh, fruity Ksara Blanc de Blancs 2006, a subtly oaked blend of Sauvignon, Semillon, and Chardonnay.

The one dish I felt paired better with a red was Fakhreldine’s spiced lamb flatbreads - redolent of cinnamon and allspice - which matched Ksara’s red Reserve du Couvent, a belnd of Syrah, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. We also found reds more to our taste with the main courses, a slightly disappointing dish of five-spice lamb and bukhari rice, and an exceptional mixed meat grill - skewers of lamb, infused with smoky charcoal aromas, which worked a treat with the Ksara Souverain 2004 - a wine made from a 50%/50% blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Arinarnoa - a rare crossing of Merlot and Petit Verdot. It proved a voluptuous, richly aromatic match for the lamb. This was followed by skewers of succulent lamb known as lahim meshoue, and lamb cutlets which were accompanied by Ksara’s longest-aged reds Château 2002 and Château 1999, a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Petit Verdot which had been aged in French oak for 18 months. Both were finely nuanced wines, with good length and complexity though I thought the 2002 was marginally better with the lamb.

The surprise hit of the tasting foodwise? Shish taouk skewers, or chicken marinaded in chilli, garlic and lemon ‘ then flash grilled (a recipe I’ll be giving you my version of for my Lebanese feast tomorrow) The simplicity of this dish belies its excellence: tender, succulent pieces of chicken served with toum, a wicked garlic dip which left me reeling for a few hours - and I love garlic. This dish was tricky to match, with its intensely garlicky character. It would almost have been worth going back to the Sauvignon-based Blanc de Blancs.

The meal finished on a light note with fresh fruit, sorbet, and Lebanese cheese. In place of the usual sweet pastries, we drank a Ksara Vin D’Or from 1935, still vibrantly honeyed - quite extraordinary for its age.

As a footnote I’d be curious to discover more about alternatives to wine with Lebanese food. Claudia Roden writes about ‘white’ coffee, a typical Lebanese after-dinner drink consisting of hot water and orange blossom essence, and I feel there is great potential for non-alcoholic syrups, fruit juices and teas which I think would work well with these richly aromatic dishes.

Fakhreldine
85 Piccadilly
W1J 7NB
Tel: 020 7493 3424
www.fakhreldine.co.uk

Château Ksara
www.ksara.com.lb

Stockists in UK:
everywine.co.uk
wineman.co.uk

Image credit: Jeff Velis from Pixabay

How do you tell when a wine is ready to drink?

When asked at a tutored tasting when his Grand Cru Chablis would be ready to drink, the maverick Burgundy and Luberon producer Jean-Marie Guffens replied in his usual opaque way “It’s not a question of when the wine is ready, it’s a question of when you are ready”. Guffens was, I think, attempting to get away from what he saw as the tyranny of ‘the perfect moment’, the year, the month, the day even, when a wine is ‘at its best’.

There’s no doubt that wines today are increasingly made to be consumed across a wide age spectrum. In reds, finishing the fermentation in barrel serves to soften the impact of tannins making the wine more approachable when young. And in whites, very careful sulphur dosing means that the fruit is available from Day One. This is both desireable and necessary as few consumers of even the best wines have either a good reserve of wine or a decent cellar to store it in. Good bottles are drunk ever younger.

But there is more to Guffens’ point than this. It can depend on the circumstances. I recall a Best Wine Moment involving a 1982 Latour served at my brother-in-law’s 40th birthday ten years ago. It was the best bottle in my cellar at the time and I hesitated momentarily before drawing it from the rack, convinced it was bound not to be at its best. It was served blind at the dinner party and, without being able to name the wine (he had never drunk Latour before) my brother-in-law could tell it was something very special: he was close to tears when the bottle was unwrapped. Yes, still a long way from being fully mature, but we were definitely ready for it.

What’s the rule?
If there are exceptions to the rules, what are the rules? The science is still hazy, probably just as well, and of course there is a range of opinion. Readiness to drink is certainly something to do with development of flavour - a wine that tastes of fresh grapes is by definition a young wine - and it’s something to do with texture and palate-balance, the harmony of the elements in the glass.

But there is another yardstick that while equally difficult to measure has served me well, and that’s the structural development of the wine, the relationship between beginning, middle and end.

Very mature wines share common characteristics, a swansong bouquet allied to a short finish. To cite an example, I hunted down a 70 year old burgundy (Corton Grand Cru from Lebegue) for my father’s 70th birthday. Family and friends gathered round to taste the wine immediately after it had been decanted. Both bouquet and taste were initially thrilling - the smell of the summer of my father’s birth year in a glass - but within only a few minutes the wine had turned almost to water, its finish gone completely.

This is not a matter of number of years as such, but of where on its individual evolution curve a particular wine is. A simple vin de table may be at its limit after four years, a classed growth claret after forty. But when ‘old’ they will both exhibit the sensation of a lifted bouquet (a consequence of volatility) and an abrupt finish, the sensation of ‘drying out’.

The converse is also the case. A young wine - relative to its life expectancy - will tend to be dumb on the nose yet will have a long finish. This is very evident in the case of highly structured wines tasted from barrel - a Burgundy grand cru for example, which can at first seem tasteless yet offer a seemingly unending palate. Simple wines go through this phase very quickly, usually before they reach the bottle and without great flourish. They are effectively mature as soon as they reach the shelves.

Taken together these pieces of evidence lead to a basic algorithm for wine maturity, one that applies to all wines whether humble or grand. It is grounded on the relative dimensions of aroma (beginning), flavour development (middle) and length of finish (end). If the last exceeds the first, the wine is immature; if the first exceeds the last the wine is approaching the end of its life; and when the three elements are in harmony the wine is mid-mature. This approach cannot provide the whole picture but nevertheless adds a useful dimension to the understanding a wine’s cycle of maturity.

Main image credit: Helena Lopes

Wine pairings for a chocolate-themed dinner party

Ever tried chocolate with smoked salmon? Or with butternut squash soup for that matter? Unlikely matches, I’ll grant you, but ‘chocolate’ - in its confectionery guise - is actually a misnomer. It’s most likely cacao you’ll be cooking with in future, if the founders of the fashionable chocolate brand ‘Venezuelan Black’ have their way.

Real cacao adds depth of flavour, not to mention a discreet but lengthy aftertaste to savoury dishes, and a recent tasting held at Berry Bros & Rudd’s Pickering Cellar, co-hosted by Tania Harcourt-Cooze of Venezuelan Black and Rebecca Lamont, manager of Berry Bros & Rudd’s wine education school, was an intriguing insight to chocolate and wine pairing that convinced me there’s nothing crazy about savoury chocolate dishes.

The Harcourt-Coozes featured in the whimsically named television series ‘Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory‘ on Channel 4 earlier this year. Their mission was to be the first organic chocolate producers to grow and make 100% cacao from bean to bar, with many adventures and mishaps along the way.

Whilst Tania talked us through the history of the ‘Venezuelan Black’ project, we nursed an aperitif of Mailly’s Blanc de Noirs Grand Cru Champagne. Much like wine, the origin, terroir, and microclimate of cacao trees determines the quality and flavour of the highly sensitive cacao bean, and like grapes, the beans require expert handling. The two most crucial factors influencing the eventual quality of the chocolate, Tania told us, is the stage after the beans are retrieved from their pods (at their plantation El Tesoro they place them in an oak box to lock in flavour) and the method of roasting, a finely calibrated process that can make or break the chocolate’s aroma.

As an ingredient, all one needs to do is grate the cacao into dishes ‘ it melts at low temperatures and fuses seamlessly with other ingredients. The first plate demonstrated two ways of incorporating chocolate into starters. First a delicate, mildly smoked salmon served with cacao bread. Sounds strange but the cacao gave it an appealing dark, treacle colour and a hint of bitterness which made it the ideal alternative to salmon’s traditional partners, Irish soda bread or Germanic rye.

Winewise we had two options to match with the salmon - a food-friendly 2006 Tres Olmos Bodegas, a Spanish Verdejo white from Garciarevalo in Rueda, and a sublime 2005 Clos Blanc de Vougeot, 1er Cru, Domaine de la Vougeraie from Burgundy. The former, with its crisp acidity, made a perfect partner with the salmon I thought, whereas the classic, delicately oaked white Burgundy was a better pairing for our second starter: spiced butternut squash soup with cacao creme fraiche. The slight curried note in the soup could easily have overwhelmed the wine, but Rebecca calibrated the pairing perfectly, with the Burgundy’s length emphasized by the butternut soup. The sprinkling of cacao in the crème fraiche was a deft touch, subtle but enough to alert one to its presence.

The second round offered four wine matches with two main dishes: the first dish a porcini risotto with grated cacao was bursting with umami, a real cracker of a dish that to my mind definitely called for a red Burgundy. Yes, we were offered a 2006 Dog Point Pinot Noir, from New Zealand’s Marlborough region, and a fine example of New Zealand Pinot it was, but this was no contest ‘ it was the 2002 Chambolle-Musigny, Les Plantes, 1er Cru from Domaine Bertagna with its fine earthy aromas, wild strawberry palate and extraordinary length that married the porcini risotto to perfection. The New Zealand Pinot, for all its exuberance, just didn’t have the same nuanced complexity as the Burgundy, nor did it do the risotto any great favours.

The second main course, a roast loin of venison served with a cacao-infused jus, was a superb foil for the venison which was cooked a point, still pink and succulent. The two wines we sampled were like chalk and cheese: a 1998 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape was a spicy jewel of a red Rhone, its gaminess dissipating on the palate to reveal ripe red fruit. A perfectly executed wine for a perfectly executed dish. Our second wine a 1990 Chateau Gruaud Larose tasted surprisingly muted, possibly because it suffered the misfortune of coming after the robust Chateauneuf-du-Pape. The idea of fielding a red Bordeaux was fine, it just didn’t match with the venison, or the risotto for that matter. One perhaps to keep for roast lamb.

The next course of this decadent tasting was a sampling of truffles made from four varieties of Venezuelan Black chocolate with champagne and Maury. All the truffles were made to Tania’s recipes. A tropical Rio Caribe Superior with a lovely smoothness and hints of citrus - and I could have sworn a touch of coconut - was matched with the Mailly Blanc de Noirs, but I thought it went just as well, if not better with the proferred Krug Grande Cuvee with all its rich, toastiness (as did most of the truffles!)

Hacienda El Tesoro, Venezuelan Black’s ‘house brand’ with its flavour of berry fruits was slightly sharper than the Rio Caribe, and worked better with the Mailly Blanc de Noirs, whilst the Carenero Superior, although made from exactly the same ingredients as the other truffles had a noticeably sweeter element to it and a nuttiness which made it rather a good match with Rebecca’s suggested Southern French sweet red, a 2005 Domaine des Schistes Maury. Finally the San Martin, a bar whose characteristics change with each harvest, had a fruitiness which was enhanced by both the Maury and the Mailly.

As if the truffles weren’t indulgent enough, we also had a sliver of Tania’s Cloud Forest chocolate almond cake made with raw cane sugar. This was a rich, dense cake, ideal I imagine with an espresso, but the chocolate aromas, as Tania had correctly warned us, didn’t come through as powerfully as in the truffles. Still, cake is cake and it was delicious.

Finally, a perfect way to send us off on a cold December night - a chocolate hot shot. This was a really invigorating little shot, which Rebecca mischievously enhanced with Berry’s finest Cognac - my neighbour observed it would be the perfect après-ski drink. Y

A Christmas special of ‘Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory’ will be screened on Channel 4 December 17th.

For information about future fine wine and food tastings visit the Berry Brothers website bbr.com

Image credit: NoName_13 from Pixabay