Match of the week

Pot roast pheasant with St-Chinian

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on September 21 2009 at 08:08

Once the game season starts to get into full swing my husband ventures into the kitchen. Pheasant, of course, doesn’t come into season until the 1st of October but our local butcher was obviously clearing out last year’s stocks and we picked one up for a song.

My husband pot roasted it with vegetables, spices and a heady concoction of red wine, brandy and port which as you can imagine created quite a powerful sauce for any wine to contend with so we pulled out a 2007 Thierry Navarre Le Laouzil St-Chinian we’d brought back from France. It’s a blend of Grenache, Syrah and Carignan - the latter not my favourite grape, generally - but it proved the perfect match, the wine standing up to the sauce, the sauce adding real elegance to the wine and bringing out its peppery top notes.

I remember visiting Thierry Navarre when we first went to the Languedoc in the early 1990s but his wines definitely have more finesse now. It’s stocked at £9.95 in the UK by Stone, Vine and Sun. Le Laouzil means ‘schiste’ in Occitan, according to the site.

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