How to eat like the Veronese

As you walk through the door of Al Pompiere in Verona you could easily be back in the '70s. A timbered ceiling, checked table cloths, walls lined with pictures of guests through the ages, it’s every inch the traditional trat. In one corner where hams line the shelves and hang from the ceiling an elderly chef in a toque is slicing ham and other salumi to order with a large, impressively flashy machine. If you think it’s old-fashioned though take a look at their website - the retro feel is deliberate but they’re linked to all the social media.

I was taken there by Mateja Gravner of Bertani, one of the best known producers of Valpolicella and Amarone, who had sensibly decided we should have a classic Veronese experience rather than a high-end gastronomic one. Although it’s well featured on Trip Advisor it’s still very much a place for locals who easily outnumbered tourists on the night we were there.

No wonder - the food is amazing. We naturally had to kick off with the ham which included a local prosciutto, cooked shoulder, salami cured with Valpolicella, coppa and some great fresh pickles, perfect with Bertani’s fresh, full-flavoured 2011 Soave Sereole. We thought we’d also agreed to share subsequent courses but each had our own, starting with a helping of the best pasta e fagioli I’ve ever eaten, made from rich earthy borlotti beans, cooked to a silky puree and served with offcuts of fresh pasta - a frugal yet beautiful dish.

There was a pasta of the day - tagliatelle with artichoke hearts that I suspect had been par-boiled then slowly cooked with oil and butter, served simply with parmesan - a revelation with Bertani’s Secco Valpolicella Valpantena 2010, which is made in the ‘ripasso’ style.

Artichokes and red wine are normally a complete no-no, making the wine taste oddly sweet but with the existing touch of sweetness in the wine that didn’t happen.

Next, a dish of ‘capel del prete’ a large chunky sausage with lentils with the 2007 Ognisanti a single vineyard Valpolicella from the Villa Novare estate, a deeply savoury wine made from late-picked grapes. That was followed by a dish of veal cheek cooked in amarone served with 1972 and 1964 vintages of the Bertani Amarone Classico. The 1972 vintage had lost it, developing unattractively bitter dark leafy flavours but the 1964 was magnificent - delicate and sweet with a haunting aroma of dried red rose petals. 48 years old! It certainly didn't taste it.

We finished off with cheese - a Monte Veronese Ubriaco, a local parmesan-like cheese immersed for several days in grape must, which came with a sweet red onion marmalade and a Gorgonzola served with honey and fig and nut bread. Both defeated the dry wines and needed Bertani's sweet recioto 2009 to offset their sharpness and strength.

There is also an amazing winelist at the restaurant with pages of other valpolicellas and amarones. The ideal environment to learn about both wines.

Oh and by the way the equally unreconstructed hotel we stayed in, theHotel Accademia in Via Scala, 12, is perfectly situated in the middle of Verona - ideal for exploring the town. Don't miss the cakes at breakfast!

I ate in the restaurant and stayed in Verona as a guest of Bertani.

Two classic meals in Chablis

I came across this article the other day which I wrote 4 years ago after a visit to Chablis. We attended two great dinners organised by Daniel Defaix and Herv Tucki of La Chablisienne which were an object lesson in how to pair Chablis with food. I thought it deserved a re-run.

"Last week I was in Chablis and had two amazing meals which showed off the accompanying wines to perfection. The common factor was that neither was at all elaborate - in fact they couldn’t have been simpler. But the ingredients and flavours were chosen with great care

The first was a lunch with Daniel Defaix in his restaurant La Cuisine au Vin. Like many winemakers he likes to show off older vintages but in his case he really means old. We had previously sampled a vertical of his premier cru Les Lys going back to 1978.

We started with two Chablisien classics, gougres (little balls of choux pastry flavoured with old Comte cheese) and snails in garlic butter with which we drank his comparatively young (for Defaix) 2000 Cote de Lechet Premier Cru.

We then had the local spin on oeufs on meurette - normally made with a red wine sauce but here with a Chablis and cream-based one and topped with finely shaved truffles - again amazing with the super-elegant Cote de Lechet.

The next course was just-cooked fillets of red mullet in a light Chablis sauce served with an outrageously rich Joel Rebuchon-style potato pure which contains half its weight in butter. You couldn’t have accompanied this with a fuller chardonnay - it really needed the acidity of a youthful but intense Chablis in this case, the 2000 Les Lys which Defaix describes as the most ‘intellectual’ of his wines.

The main course was another classic, Jambon au Chablis, made to a family recipe with an intensely reduced Chablis-based sauce. With this we drank the ‘81 Les Lys which had acquired a rich creamy, almost mushroomy flavour of its own.

We followed it with three local cheeses, Chaource, Soumaintrain and Epoisses, served - and this made all the difference - with a small salad scattered with walnuts and dressed with a light nut oil dressing which built a bridge to the 26 year old (as I write this, I can hardly believe it!) wine.

We finished with a quite excellent crumble of autumn fruits including grapes and figs with which Defaix served one of his own liqueurs, a prunelle (wild plum) - a really fantastic match.

So - outrageous amounts of cream and butter throughout - but in small quantities which didn’t make the meal overwhelmingly rich. It did however underline just how well these ingredients show off great Chablis and the value of serving dishes without unnecessary embellishment when you’re serving an exceptional wine (You can order a similar meal at the restaurant matched with Defaix wines for 59 euros)

The second meal, which took place at the restaurant of Chablis’ main hotel the Hostellerie des Clos, was devised by Herv Tucki, the public relations director of La Chablisienne in conjunction with the chef Michel Vignaud. After the obligatory gougres (served with their whistle-clean Petit Chablis 2006) we started with a first course of poached oysters in seawater jelly and watercress cream, a classic match-with-a-twist for their old vine Chablis, the 2004 Les Vnrables.

We then had a really excellent cod and clam stew with vegetables in a light ‘nage’ of Chablis, chicken stock, cream and butter. Much less creamy than the Defaix sauces it was an equally good mach for a Mont de Milieu 2004 that had already acquired the characteristic pierre fusil (gunflint) notes of a mature Chablis.

The main course was veal fillet and kidneys, served quite rare, an outstanding match for this ambitious co-op’s flagship wine, the opulently rich Chateau Grenouilles 2003. The crucial touch here was the accompanying light meat-based juice rather than a heavy reduction which would have overwhelmed both the wine and the meat.

Cheese, which we took in preference to dessert, was served with my favourite wine of the meal, a 2003 Grand Cru Les Preuses, again showing maturity but also a wonderful mineral intensity. Normally you wouldn’t put a great wine with a cheeseboard - certainly not a red wine - but thanks to the careful selection of the sommelier who picked out a young goats’s cheese (a Vezelay), a Tomme, a richer Pierre qui Vire (a soft washed-rinded cheese) and a salty Chaource, all from the region, there was absolutely no clash with the wine.

As opposed to the Defaix meal which focussed on flavours and ingredients that were Chablis-friendly this meal was particularly interesting for its choice of main course dishes and in terms of showing how Chablis can be carried right through a conventional restaurant meal (though the menu was slightly different from the one normally served at the Hostellerie des Clos) Sometimes these exercises can seem contrived but it was a tribute to Tucki and Vignaud that it seemed entirely unforced.

Winemakers don’t always appreciate how to show off their wines at the table but both Tucki and Defaix are great gourmets who understand that most of their customers want to enjoy their wines with food rather than in a tasting room. "

Vive les guingettes!

An admirable website, Matching Food and Wine, but a bit short on singalongs. Could we begin by joining in lustily, therefore, altogether now...

Vive la friture! Vive le goujon!
Non, je vous l’assure, rien n’est aussi bon!

Horrible. Never mind, the point is the French fete nationale, the 14th of July, has just passed, with its big outdoor dances, and the annual Paris-Plages programme of pop-up beach entertainments is just starting. Both feature events themed on the old riverside dancehall /restaurants known as guinguettes. We’re talking accordions, waltzes, javas, paso dobles, the classic repertoire of the bal-musette culture of working class vieux Paris transposed to the banks of the Seine and the Marne, with food added.

Although the once great stock of guinguettes continues to decline, periodic revivals keep interest alive, and we’re in the middle of one now, thanks to characters like Melina Sadi, aka la Baronne, bal impresaria extraordinaire, and the excellent musette revival band Mimile et les Ramulots. And clich though it may be, the guinguette is a gastronomic institution worth reviving, like anything French and functional to do with catering.

The banks of the Marne east of Bastille and Bercy are prime guinguette territory. Although the earliest forerunners sprang up in Paris, they’d moved by the Golden Age of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries to the suburbs, originally to avoid the capital’s duty on alcohol.

This year the departement of the Val de Marne inaugurated a new guinguette festival based around the suburbs of Nogent-sur-Marne, Champigny and Joinville-le-Pont. The verdant banks of the river here are dotted with derelict ex- dancehalls, some in the lovely half-timbered neo-Normand style, while Joinville is still home to the great brick buildings which once housed the studios responsible for the cinematic mythologizing of the Golden Age guinguettes.

The last representatives of that age still function here, too, notably Chez Gegene, overpriced, culinarily to be given a wide berth, but still spectacular. Gegene is nowadays rivalled by the leading light from the neo-guinguette revival of the Nineties, the Guinguette de l’Isle du Martin- Pecheur. Here you find a curious mix of elderly waltzing couples, Come Dancing exhibitionists, retro-fashionistas, working class families, jazz fans, bikers and the occasional intrepid tourist.

But what about the food and wine? Well, as we just warbled so tunelessly, fish was traditionally the big attraction. Especially fried fish, the classic petite friture once caught prolifically on the doorsteps of the guinguettes; goujons (gurnard), and eperlans (smelt). Eperlans are still to be found, though the examples I tried were disappointingly dry and lacklustre, rather worse than the similarly degenerate British whitebait, and like them caught now in the North Sea and frozen.

The other great classics of the guinguette repertoire have all but disappeared. These were the robust stews made with eels, assorted river fish and wine, onions, and roux, the matelotes and gibelottes. “We’ve tried putting them on the menu” said Jean-Yves Dupin, founder of the Martin-Pecheur, “but people aren’t interested anymore.” The best that seems to be available now is moules frites, the occasional fricasse of eels, and a few OK brasserie dishes.

As for wine, well, time first for another tune. A one, a two, a one, two, three ...

Ah! Le petit vin blanc! Qu’on boit sous les tonnelles,
Quand les filles sont belles, Du cote de Nogent!

God that was even worse. The petit vin blanc of Jean Drejac’s famous music hall number still exists, so I went to meet its producers, the Confrerie de Vin Blanc de Nogent This is one of around thirty such associations leading another renaissance: that of wine production in the Ile de France, the region surrounding the capital.

On a Saturday morning I found Philippe Jouvin, a retired banker and current Grand Maitre of the confrerie, hoeing in the sunshine in the corner plot of the magnificent chateau grounds donated by the municipality. Up to the eighteenth century, Nogent was part of one of the largest vignobles in the country, producing the cheap white wine known as guinguet which probably gave the guinguettes their name. By the mid twentieth century, wine making here had almost died out. Then in the 1980s individuals began to replant plots of vines. The wine of Saint Maur des Fosses, celebrated in the Middle Ages, is now produced again from vines in a private garden, and wins prizes. Le petit vin blanc of Nogent is made from Chardonnay, Riesling and Pinot Blanc grapes vinified by confrere Stephane Pessin, a Burgundy man, currently accountant at the Intercontinetal Hotel in Paris. Frustratingly, I was unable to taste it. Last year’s vintage wasn’t bottled yet, and in any event, the wine of Nogent is a vin culturel, consumed only at special private events, and not for sale. For the same reason, the white wine washing down the North Sea friture at the Martin Pecheur, for example, is Muscadet.

This would not have bothered the great gastronome Curnonsky, who opined that fried goujons should only be eaten on the banks of the Seine, accompanied by Chablis and buttered bread. However, in view of the current mode for consuming local, it reinforces the necessity of reviving the whole gastronomy of the guinguettes, in the same way the musical side has been rejuvenated. This means local wines en pichet, a rediscovery of the matelote, and serious attention to sourcing and frying proper river fish. What could be more desirable? What are the French waiting for?

In anticipation, shall we try that first number again? You can keep your Bob Dylans and your Carla Sarkozys, this is what I call a lyric. Vive la friture! Vive le goujon!

For information on the guinguettes of the Val de Marne visit www.tourisme-valdemarne.com

Philip Sweeney is a food, travel and music writer. He has his own blog The Boulevardier.

Gorgeous green Oregon

If I had to live anywhere in the US it would be Oregon. Admittedly the last couple of days have been unbelievably beautiful but I think it’s more that it’s comfortingly familiar - with green rolling hills and woods and flower-strewn hedgerows. Very much like Burgundy, the spiritual home of most Oregonian winemakers.

Oregon winemaking is green through and through. Apparently a third of the wineries have some kind of certification - most under the LIVE (Low Input Viticulture and Enology) program which covers both viticulture and wineries or the umbrella organisation OCSW (Oregon Certified Sustainable Wine) which seems to have more stringent requirements still. There’s a parallel movement protecting farmed salmon and their fisheries called Salmon Safe. I’m still trying to get my head round all these schemes.

On top of that some producers are organic and others biodynamic. The latter is the most controversial, as elsewhere with its proponents claiming they can see improved vitality and purity in their wines and others pointing out it doesn’t necessarily involve sustainable practice in the vineyards. But everyone I’ve spoken too - admittedly some of the best in the state - is thoughtful and philosophic about the way they’re making wine.

After an early visit to one of the Willamette Valley pioneers Bethel Heights (above) we had lunch today with the guys from Cristom (sustainable not organic or biodynamic) and two visiting winemakers from New Zealand who had also been at IPNC - Matthew Donaldson and Lynette Hudson from Pegasus Bay. Matthew reckons that Oregon is 10 years ahead of New Zealand in terms of sustainability which is saying something given that as from this year New Zealand wineries have to be sustainable if they want an export certificate.

It must also have been the only winery lunch I’ve been to which was cooked by a sales & marketing director - John D’Anna (right) who turns out to be quite some chef. We had panzanella with heirloom tomatoes, a hot smoked salmon and pepper salad on corn cakes (great with both the 2008 Cristom Pinot Gris and ’08 Germaine Vineyard Chardonnay), braised lamb with pomegranate and beans - a stellar match for winemaker Steve Doerner’s 2007 Sommers Reserve Pinot Noir and some hastily snatched local cheeses before we headed back to Portland for a final 24 hours checking out the restaurant and food truck scene. It was such a perfect winemaker’s lunch I’m trying to persuade John to share the recipes.

Apparently the 2007 Pinots got trashed in the US press but I'm loving the way they’re showing - really savoury, complex and meaty. Very much to the ‘old world’ palate - if there is such a thing these days.