What kind of food should you serve with fine wine?

Most of the time we’re pairing wine and food it’s the food that comes first but for people in the trade it’s more often about what food will flatter the wine. But how do you ensure a successful match?

I went to two top end wine dinners last week which took different approaches to the task. The first a tasting and dinner hosted simultaneously in Brussels, Hamburg and London by the Bureau Interprofessionel des Vins de Bourgogne showcased premier crus, especially Chablis, Meursault and Gevrey-Chambertin.

They decided on a four course menu with effectively two main courses - roast breast of chicken with pearl barley and vegetable risotto to showcase Maison Albert Bichot’s Domaine du Pavillon 2010 Meursault les Charmes and seared rump of lamb with borlotti bean, marrow and confit tomato cassoulet to go with a 2013 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos Prieur from Maison Louis Max.

The first course, which was paired with Nathalie and Gilles Fèvre’s 2010 Chablis Vaulorent was a a dish of very lightly cooked smoked fish with chive and lemon creme fraiche and ‘young leaves and shoots’

Picking out the flavours of the wines

Clearly the thinking had been to come up with pairings based on the flavours that could be found in or which complemented the wines. A trace of smokiness in the Chablis, for example, mirrored that in the fish, the cream offset it and the citrus picked up on the still fresh acidity of the wine. Chicken is invariably a safe bet with chardonnay so they were on solid ground with the Meursault, though the glazed shallot was an imaginative touch which particularly flattered the wine.

Interestingly a similar ingredient appeared in the other dinner, a very glamourous affair hosted in the Berry Bros & Rudd directors’ dining room. Here the caramelized note was provided by the glazed endive that was served in the first course with duck pastrami and crisp little gorgonzola fritters which picked up the rich golden character of the two 2004 burgundies they served, a La Sève du Clos Meursault from Arnaud Ente and a Le Montrachet Grand Cru from Domaine des Comtes Lafon. A particularly bold pairing that could only have come from road-testing the match with the wine or one very similar to it.

Should you save the best wine for the cheese?

Given they had both red burgundy and bordeaux to show off they went for the classic French solution of serving the burgundies - a 1999 Jacques-Frederic Mugnier Chambolle Musigny and a 1999 Gevrey-Chambertin Clos St Jacques from Domaine Armand Rousseau - with the main course (roast saddle of lamb with anchovy, parsley and mint) and the bordeaux with the cheese which I seem to recall, though things were slightly hazy by this stage, were a Rollright, a washed rind cheese made in the style of a Reblochon, a punchy Lincolnshire Poacher and a Shropshire Blue. Personally I found they didn’t really do the wines - a fragile 1945 (NO, that’s not a misprint - 1945!) Clos Fourtet St Emilion and an utterly glorious 1990 Chateau Margaux (for me the wine of the evening) many favours but what do you do? The sort of people who dine at Berry’s (mainly chaps of a certain age, I imagine) no doubt both expect cheese and to drink the best reds in the house with it. Personally I’d rather go with beef or lamb and if I had to serve cheese pick just one but again guests expect a proper cheeseboard, regardless of whether its contents detract from the wine or not. It’s a dilemma.

The burgundies did work beautifully with the lamb however.

Should you serve a sweet wine?

Desserts were also handled differently. Given that burgundy doesn’t produce sweet wine the BIVB didn’t serve anything with the refreshing lemon and honeycomb mousse they picked, which was accompanied by poached fruit, brown sugar meringue and almond brittle. It worked fine - you didn’t really need one - but an alternative might have been to serve a liqueur from the region from someone like Gabriel Boudier.

At Berry Brothers they decided to use the dessert course as a platform to show off a very special port - the Graham’s 90 Very Old Tawny Port that had been specially bottled to celebrate the Queen’s 90th birthday that happened to be that day (what a treat!). They boldly paired it with a chocolate delice with passion fruit curd and ginger ice cream which worked surprisingly well - it was still extraordinarily vibrant - though the cheese - especially the Shropshire Blue - would have worked too.

Apart from the use of caramelisation, one of the other interesting things I noted was the use of bitter ingredients, particularly in the main course lamb dish at the burgundy dinner which included olives, capers and preserved lemon - all of which tend to heighten the fruit in older wines. Other dishes employed anchovy, cavolo nero and rosemary to similar effect. Care was taken though not to overwhelm any of the dishes with over-flavourful vegetables or intense jus which could have knocked the stuffing out of these spectacular vintages.

Ideally you would have a run-through before a dinner of this kind but with old, rare and possibly priceless wines that might well not be possible. The key thing I think is to make sure the chef and front of house team both try the wines being poured with the food so they can consign it to their palate memories for a future occasion.

(Incidentally a neat trick from Berry Bros. They marked both the menu and the glasses with coloured dots so you could remember, in your befuddled state, which glass was which!)

I attended the dinners as a guest of the BIVB and Berry Bros & Rudd respectively.

Main image credit: Kerstin Riemer from Pixabay

What to eat with Cloudy Bay

For most people the New Zealand winery Cloudy Bay is synonymous with sauvignon blanc but their range now extends to sparkling, sweet and red wines, a message underlined by a dinner at Hix Mayfair (in Brown’s Hotel) the other day.

Hix’s style - like that of St John - is minimalist: carefully sourced ingredients cooked as simply as possible. In fact a couple of his suppliers were at the table including the ebullient Peter Hannan of the Meat Merchant whose whose fantastic guanciale I tried the other day.

Cloudy Bay’s wines, on the other hand are generous and full of personality - classically ‘new world’. How would the two get on?

The best matches ironically were not with sauvignon but with pinot of which they now have two - one from their home territory of Marlborough, the other from Central Otago.

The more delicate Marlborough one - a 2012 - was paired with a rib of Peter Hannan’s superb bacon with Bramley apple sauce and the more robust 2011 Te Wahi with two courses: a Glenarm Estate steak with Hampshire ‘pennybuns’ (ceps) with parsley and a washed rind cheese called Guernsey Goddess made by Alex James (of Blur fame) from Guernsey milk and washed in Somerset Cider Brandy. That was the biggest surprise because although the cheese wasn’t particularly ‘stinky’ it was very rich and creamy but was a fantastic match with the sweet-fruited pinot.

The better known sauvignon - now on the 2014 vintage - kicked off the dinner with a threesome of oysters (I like the way Hix avoids the word ‘trio’) - some natives, rocks with cucumber green chilli and shallots and some deep-fried rocks served with a rich bearnaise-y style mayo (at his Fish and Oyster House in Dorset he serves a ransom mayonnaise but as ransoms aren’t in season I’m guessing he used herbs). That was the best match of the three but the natives were somewhat overwhelmed by the wine and the oysters with rocks and chilli not quite as good a match as you’d expect. (I think it needed more Asian-style seasoning which isn’t really Hix)

The next course of Wye Valley asparagus (a second, late harvest) and purslane salad was spot on though. There’s more going on than just asparagus flavours in the Cloudy Bay Sauvignon but enough to link to the dish - an explosion of green herbal flavours that was just delicious.

The course I didn’t think quite worked was a steamed fillet of St Mary’s Bay turbot (below) with sea beet and rape-seed oil where the fish was ironically so fresh it threw the accompanying 2013 Cloudy Bay chardonnay out of kilter, emphasising its oak rather than its creaminess. I think an older vintage or a light butter sauce of some kind - or even melted butter (better than rapeseed oil with this wine) - would have made it work.

And the luscious 2007 Late Harvest riesling wasn’t done any huge flavours by the Peruvian Gold chocolate mousse. Given Hix uses British ingredients it would have been better with something apple-based.

So great food, great wine but only a limited number of great matches in my opinion. It’s a problem with wine dinners. Restaurants don’t have the time or staff resources to tweak or change their dishes to match the wines and its hard taking wines out of their natural register - in Cloudy Bay’s case, the big flavours of Asian-accented New Zealand food. That doesn’t mean of course you shouldn’t do it. A preliminary run-through tends to highlight any problems.

I attended the dinner as a guest of Cloudy Bay.

Image credit: Matt Boulton, CC BY-SA 2.0

Pairing wine with Szechuan (or Sichuan) cuisine

Just as you think you might have got to grips with matching wine with Chinese food along comes a regional cuisine like Szechuan which is twice as challenging, as I discovered at a wine dinner at Flinty Red in Bristol. Flinty Red has closed since I originally wrote this post in 2012, but the wine pairing lessons remain.

Pairing wine with Szechuan cuisine

I had already had a go at trying to find wines that would go with the fiery flavours of Szechuan cuisine at Bar Shu in Soho alongside the formidable Fuchsia Dunlop, author of Sichuan Cookery and the recently published Every Grain of Rice. I seem to remember we concluded that fruity rosé and a soft ripe Bordeaux without too much tannin were good options but it wasn’t easy.

The talented team at Flinty Red - Dom Harman, Rachel Higgens and chefs Matthew Williamson and Claire Thomson - took a different direction with the wines which were paired with the home-style dishes of Lily Wang of the Szechuan capital, Chengdu, who happens to be Claire's stepmother. What was notable about the meal was its striking changes of pace - from the delicate herb broth and fragrant scallop dish in which you caught every nuance of the scallop meat to the fiery 'multi-flavoured chicken' and hot and sour noodles - a real switchback ride for the palate.

The standout matches included two rieslings - the 2010 R3 Riesling trocken from Stefan Breuer and slightly sweeter 2010 Riesling spätlese, Gut Hermannsberg which were paired with three dishes - sweet and sour spicy cucumber with stewed ox tongue (which had apparently been braised for a day and a half in 18 different spices), some fragrant pork dumplings with Chinese chives and the spicy multi-flavour chicken. The drier R3 worked best with the intensely aromatic tongue - a wonderful dish - while the spätlese coped better with the heat of the chicken. I think the fact that both were recent vintages helped.

Interestingly they switched back to a drier white with the scallops - a 2009 R & A Pfalll Grüner Veltliner Hundsleiten - which had a refreshing herbal edge that perfectly suited the delicate, cooling dish.

The big surprise of the evening however was an intensely aromatic 2011 Zohar Torrontes from Susanna Balbo in Argentina’s Salta region which was an outstanding wine pairing with a tricky to match dish of cold ‘hot and sour' noodles with Szechuan pepper and chilli oil which somehow enhanced its own floral character. But it didn’t work with the next dish of Mapo Dofu (a very spicy tofu recipe also known unflatteringly as ‘old pock-marked woman’), rice and Szechuan pickles.

Nor on the other hand did a very pretty raspberryish 2010 Framingham Pinot Noir though it possibly might have done if it had been chilled for longer. It was the only match that didn’t come off through the whole evening though a Bruno Sorg Crémant d’Alsace struggled a bit with a very peppery dish of spiced potato. Sichuan pepper is particularly hard to handle as it’s not only hot but leaves your mouth tingling.

The final intriguing pairing was a semi-sparkling gamay called Boisson Rouge from Domaine Montrieux, a natural wine that hit it off surprisingly well with the dessert - a sticky rice ball with nuts and sugar - and also provided a palate-cleansing finish to the meal.

All credit, I must say, to Lily and the guys at Flinty Red for an incredible meal and some inspired matches - and for proving how well Szechuan food can lend itself to a tasting menu. It would have been hard to find one wine to go throughout the meal though if I’d have been forced to chose I would probably have gone for the spätlese riesling.

Note: Sweet wine obviously has an affinity with the fiery heat of some Szechuan dishes as you can read from Margaret Rand’s write-up of an earlier dinner with Tokaji here.

You may also enjoy: 

• Pairing wines with Chinese cuisine
• Wine pairings for a Chinese stir-fry
• Beer pairings for Chinese food

Photo by Engin Akyurt

How to host a wine pairing dinner

Ollie Couillaud’s inaugural wine dinner at The Lawn Bistro in Wimbledon, west London yesterday was a masterclass in how to get it right.

First of all he only had four courses. Too many wine dinners these days have multiple small courses, challenging for the kitchen and sommelier, wearying and unsatisfying for the customer (particularly male customers, it has to be said) who want a ‘proper’ meal - and are entitled to have one for the money they’re paying.

Two wines (all burgundies) were served with every course - except the aperitif and the dessert. That gave the presenter, Master Sommelier Gearoid Devaney of Flint Wines something interesting to talk about and the attendees a chance to learn more about this complex and confusing region. They were also from different producers and vintages.

The menu was well chosen. That should go without saying but sometimes the chef’s ego gets in the way of showcasing the wines to best effect.

We kicked off with some clever ‘amuses’ including the most wicked, silky-textured chicken liver parfait I’ve ever eaten which were served with a glass of 2009 Domaine Ballot Millot Bourgogne Blanc from vineyards which border Meursault, showing how impressive basic burgundy can be in the hands of a good producer.

Next a sound choice of seared scallops and black pudding with Granny Smith apple purée and lentil and hazelnut vinaigrette - a great foil for two lovely white burgundies, a 2009 St Aubin 1er Cru Charmois from Domaine Paul Pillot and a 2010 Chassagne-Montrachet from Domaine Moreau. The Moreau was still incredibly young but opened up beautifully in the glass.

The main course of roast squab pigeon with foie gras, Jerusalem artichoke purée, fondant potato and port and orange sauce looked challenging on paper but worked amazingly well with both the 2005 Aloxe-Corton Domaine Lebreuil and 2008 Beaune 1er Cru Les Sizies Domaine Guiton that were served with it, the lighter, more elegant Beaune, surprisingly, having the edge over the richer, earthier Aloxe-Corton.

And the dessert was served simply on its own - a croustade of caramelised apples with vanilla ice cream with a show-stopping crisp pastry cone which covered it like a witch’s hat as it was brought to the table. No accompanying wine as burgundy doesn’t do sweet wines. We didn’t miss it.

The numbers were kept low (25) to give the kitchen a chance to adjust to serving banqueting style rather than the normal restaurant service and the price was a fair £95 for the quality and amount of food and drink that was served.

The guests went away asking when the next dinner would take place. Couillaud clearly has a ready-made fan base for future events.

I attended the dinner as a guest of The Lawn Bistro.

Photo by fauxels