Which foods pair best with high alcohol red wines?

Despite the growing concern about alcohol levels in wine many reds still clock in at 14.5% or more, a level at which they can become an unbalanced pairing for traditional European food. Many traditionalist would say that they are therefore not ‘food wines’ but as with other types of wine it depends how well they’re made and whether overall the wine is in balance. Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe for example rarely hits the shelves at under 14% but wears its alcohol lightly.

In general wines of this power benefit from at least a couple of years bottle ageing - it’s the combination of high alcohol and aggressive tannins that can overwhelm the food you’re eating. I’ve drunk many an Australian Shiraz of 7 to 8 years old that has behaved like a pussycat with food.

The best type of dishes in my view to drink with big reds are:

• Rare meat especially beef - e.g. a chargrilled steak (rare meat softens the effect of big tannins)

• Slow cooked but not heavily sauced meat (lamb and pork as well as beef) Not heavily sauced because if you have an intense reduction and a full-bodied red you can barely taste the meat you’re eating

• Meat cooked with a sweet marinade or baste - e.g. barbecued ribs Sweetness will enhance the acidity in the wine, making it taste fresher.
• Meat or ‘meaty’ fish like tuna cooked with a spicy rub or crust. A touch of spice offsets a big fruity red nicely though not a hot ‘wet’ curry with a lot of spicy sauce which will just create an sense of overload on the palate.

• Haggis! (Yes, really . . . )

• Strongly flavoured vegetarian dishes based on dark Portabella mushrooms or roast or baked aubergines

• Well matured hard cheeses or sheep's cheeses. Cheese can be a minefield for red wine as regular visitors to this site will know. A full bodied red will overwhelm delicate goats’ cheeses and are likely to clash horribly with a well-matured ‘stinky’ washed rind cheese or a punchy blue but should be OK with a dry, clean tasting hard cheese, especially a sheep's cheese (the easiest cheese to pair with red wine)

• Dark chocolate. A controversial pairing but many swear by big jammy reds and dark, not oversweet chocolate. Not for me but try it!

And the dishes that don’t match full-bodied reds?

Lighter fish and vegetable-based dishes, lighter meats like chicken and veal, milder cheeses and dishes with light creamy sauces.

Image © Christian Delbert - Fotolia.com

Is red wine a good match for chocolate?

I’ve never totally bought into the idea but a recent wine and chocolate tasting put on by Australian Wine at Australia House in London went halfway to convincing me.

They put together a number of pairings with chocolates from Rococo who make some of the most delicious chocolates in London.

First off we actually tried two dry whites, a De Bortoli PHI Chardonnay, Yarra Valley 2007 which was paired with a Chocolate: Sea Salt Wafer and a 2011 Skillogalee Gewürztraminer, Clare Valley with a Chocolate: Rose Ganache.

The first was a case of ‘you could but why would you?’ There are so many other delicious things to drink with a classy chardonnay like that. I just found myself dreaming of scallops. The Gewürztraminer was more interesting though, really picking up on the rose flavours in the chocolate. I could get used to that . . .

Next two big reds, the 2008 d’Arenberg The Custodian Grenache from McLaren Vale 2008 with a Red Berry Ganache and a 2009 Mitolo GAM Shiraz with a Chocolate Blackcurrant and Violet Ganache. These both worked, amazingly, though I felt the almost porty 15% Mitolo had the edge. And again it was lovely with the filling.

We then moved on to two more conventional choices, the pretty Innocent Bystander Moscato with a really unusual White chocolate Cardamom and Saffron Ganache and Brown Brothers 2009 Orange Muscat and Flora, Victoria with a Mango, Passion Fruit and Orange Ganache.

Oddly these didn’t work as well for me. The orange flavours in the chocolate knocked out the same flavours in the Muscat and at 5.5% the Moscato was just a bit light for such a rich, exotic chocolate. But I took a sip of the Skillagolee Gewürztraminer with it which was terrific. I can imagine a slightly sweeter Gewürz being an amazing match for these flavours.

And finally, more familiar territory - a couple of ‘stickies’, the Campbells Classic Rutherglen Muscat with a Pecan and Spice Praline and a rich, toffeed Grant Burge 10 year old Tawny NV with a Coffee and Cardamom Marzipan chocolate - both cracking pairings but as I don’t have a particularly sweet tooth I preferred the Grant Burge.

Pushing the boundaries of food and wine matching is always fun but doesn’t quite take into account how much mood is tied up with chocolate. If you had a gorgeous bottle of Chardonnay would you eat chocolate with it? Or would you hand chocolates round with the Shiraz at a dinner party? I suspect not.

That said, it worked better than I thought it would and the very original character of the chocolates with their exotic, spicy, floral fillings made it a hedonistic experience by any standards. Food for thought and a bit more experimentation here.

The day I cooked with Léoville las Cases

“Isn’t it time you wrote a piece on cooking with wine again?” mused my editor over lunch. “How about cooking with a bottle of first growth Bordeaux?” I gulped. “Er, I don’t think most of our readers would do that.” “Well, we should try it out for them.” he said firmly.

OK, there’s a case. Imagine the scene - there’s two of you. Great bottle. Great steak. Why open another lesser bottle to make the steak sauce if the bottle you’ve got is going to make the best sauce you’ve ever tasted? Besides, as I had rashly admitted to Guy, I had successfully used a glass of top quality white burgundy in a upmarket version of chicken with white wine sauce and mushrooms which had so impressed my guests they’d talked about it for weeks afterwards. So, yes, why not?

I mentioned the experiment to some chef pals who were all uniformly sniffy about it but then chefs are notoriously mean. They also - as chefs do - all disagreed with how the experiment should be conducted. Whether the wine should be added at the beginning or at the end after stock. Reduced once or three times. Reduced to a third of its volume or practically nothing.

When I spoke to Guy a couple of days later, he was still up for it but conceded that we should settle for the slightly more modest Léoville Las Cases, a second growth, true, but still hardly the kind of wine you’d use for cooking unless you were Bill Gates. I decided to make a simple entrecote marchand du vin, a dish I’d normally run up with a day-old half bottle of whatever I’d been drinking the night before - something like a Cotes du Rhone Villages or a Faugeres. It was more likely that the character of the wine would show through if it was cooked relatively quickly than if it was incorporated in a long, slow braise where all the flavours melded together - although you would always add a dash of fresh wine at the end.

I cooked the steak and set it aside to rest. I sweated off a couple of shallots. poured in the equivalent of a small glass of wine and reduced it by roughly two thirds. I whisked in a bit of soft butter, seasoned it with salt and pepper and poured the steak juices back into the pan. And tasted it . . .

It was not only not the best sauce I’ve ever made but one of the worst. The reduction process completely de-natured the wine, accentuating the tannins and completely stripping the fruit.

Chefs would of course have gaily poured in a ladleful of demi-glace. I tried again using beef stock to deglaze the pan. It was better - a richer, fuller, more balanced sauce but the tannins were still obtrusive and the character of the wine was masked by the stock.

Would it be any better with a cheaper bordeaux, I wondered? I picked up an inexpensive bottle of 2005 Calvet, a vintage I thought should be able to stand up to robust treatment. I repeated the experiment, without the stock this time. It was painfully thin and acidic.

Well maybe a Chilean merlot then? Actually that was rather better. The resulting sauce had a nice degree of roundness and sweetness - but it wouldn’t be a great match for a top wine.

What if I reduced the wine very slowly rather than bubbling it fiercely? Back to the Léoville Las Cases. This time I left it barely simmering for half an hour in the pan. Some improvement but the end result was still a touch bitter. The wine was just too much of a heavyweight.

The inescapable conclusion, and it’s always a bit of a letdown to have to confirm conventional wisdom, was that this was in every way the wrong kind of wine. Not just because it was extravagant (I wouldn’t have minded that if the result had been spectacular) but that it was totally unsuited to being heated and reduced. Too young, too tannic, too concentrated. Not that it would have been any better a few years down the line. The kind of wine you need for a red wine sauce is robust, generous and fruity - unoaked or, if oaked, unobtrusively oaked. The southern French grapes - especially Grenache and Syrah - are much better suited to the task.

Conclusion number two. If you are going to use better than basic cooking wine it’s better not to reduce it too ferociously and to give it a bit longer to mellow than you would if you were using a cheaper wine. A proportion of stock certainly creates a better balance in the sauce although you lose some of the strong winey flavour. You can also adopt an old chef’s trick and add a spoonful of redcurrant jelly or a squirt of tomato ketchup to boost the sweetness. Or a little bit of cornflour to thicken it rather than over-reduce it.

Third conclusion: Good white wines work better than top red ones. Yes, there’s a danger of accentuating their acidity but that’s easier to deal with than rampant tannins. Gewurztraminer responds particularly well to being used in cooking.

Finally, even if the Léoville las Cases saucehad been transcendent I doubt it would have done the wine any favours. I tried both it and the Calvet with the sauce I’d made with the Las Cases and it really came into its own despite the inadequacies of the sauce. You don’t want your sauce to outshine your wine (take note chefs who deliver plates to the table with ridiculously sticky reductions.)

If you're interested in learning more about cooking with wine two Michelin-starred chef Raymond Blanc runs occasional courses on Food and Wine, including cooking with wine, at his restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons.

Chefs on cooking with wine:

“I’d challenge anyoneto know which variety of wine you’ve used after you’ve cooked a dish for 3 hours”
Alex Mackay, Guild of Food Writers Cookery Writer of the Year

“Like any other ingredient the quality of the wine you use is important but that doesn’t mean it has to be expensive. We get great results with rioja and some of the cheaper Rhone reds”
David Everitt-Mathias, Le Champignon Sauvage, Cheltenham

“ You should match the style of wine to the dish. If you’re cooking a recipe from the suth west of France, for example, you need something powerful, red and dark. But you wouldn’t use that for a coq au vin.” Henry Harris, Racine.

“To spend more than £4 on a bottle of wine for cooking is stupid - a complete waste of money” Raymond Blanc - Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons.

This article first appeared in the February 2007 issue of Decanter.

Possibly the best truffle dinner ever

Did I want to go on a truffle trip to Spain at the end of January? Balmy Barbados seemed like a better option but since that wasn’t on the cards and the enquiry came from an old friend I said yes. The 2 day visit - the annual Viñas del Vero ‘Days of Wine and Truffles’ in Somontano would include an outdoor picnic in the foothills of the Pyrenees (eek), a truffle hunt and - the clincher - a multi-course truffle menu by one of the region’s most talented chefs followed by a gastronomic brunch. “Bring the Gaviscon”. my friend sagely advised.

I’ll be writing about the truffle hunting in due course so let’s concentrate on the dinner at Bodega Blecua which was the best truffle experience I’ve ever had. It kicked off in style with a selection of truffle-flavoured canaps including truffle flavoured macarons, parcels of truffle threads in lambs skein (sic), tartlets of pigs trotters and truffles (awesome) and best of all, truffle flavoured truffles of the satiny consistency of the best chocolate truffles. These were served with Tio Pepe (also owned by Viñas del Vero’s owner Gonzalez Byass) and V de V’s fragrant Gewürztraminer which I’m not sure I didn’t marginally prefer, to my surprise. (The 2009 is currently on offer at £6.49 at Majestic)

The first proper course was a glassful of truffles served with a hot broth which transformed it into truffle consommé followed by ‘Royal de Trufa with egg yolks and passion’. Fortunately this turned out not to be passion fruit as I had feared but a sumptous blend of truffles and pork fat of the consistency of creamy mash, scattered with yet more truffles. (I hadn’t thought of the combination of pork fat and truffles before but it’s a winner, let me tell you). With that we drank the 2010 Viñas del Vero Clarion, a rich, structured white about whose components they were curiously reticent but which seems to be Chardonnay, Gewürztraminer and Chenin Blanc.

That was followed by one of my favourite dishes of the meal, cardoons with oysters and almond sauce topped with a truffle shaving. Again a really imaginative and delicious combination of ingredients. This was served with a 2008 Clarion in magnum which suited the dish better than the younger fruitier vintage would have done.

They then brought on a potato ‘mushroom’ with ceps, a mound of fluffy truffle-infused mash moulded into a ... well, not a mushroom, more like a potato but fantastic anyway and a good match with the Blecua 2004 served in magnum.

Blecua is the flagship wine of Viñas del Vero - a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Garnacha, and Tempranillo from seven different parcels and possibly one of the best wines you've never heard of. It has more warmth and generosity than many Bordeaux and more finesse and complexity than most Spanish reds. The '04 also went perfectly with the next course, a truffle infused risotto topped with an outrageous amount of truffles.

By this stage even I was almost truffled out but just about found room for a mouthful or two of veal shanks with truffle sauce and chestnut purée (particularly good with the richer, more complex Blecua 2005) and some local truffled cheese.

And I didn’t make much impact on either of the two interesting desserts - a semi-frozen cylinder of something faintly ice creamy with amaretti crumbs and ‘snow truffles’ on muscovado cream, a truffle-inspired but, to some relief, not truffle-flavoured finale.

The general conclusion? That truffle dinners could be a lot more inventive than they generally are, that Spanish cuisine, dare I say it, has a lot to teach the French and that truffles can take younger, fruitier wines than you might imagine. Quite an experience.

The event I went to was a private one but If you want to sample chef Carmelo Bosque’s cooking go to his restaurant La Taberna de Lillas Pastia it’s in Huesca. It specialises in truffles and has a Michelin star. Tel: +34 974 211 691.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Gonzalez Byass.