Matching food to the wines of Touraine

Food and wine matching can be a minefield.  Recommending food to go with wine can often either be alarmingly precise (“perfect with a herb and polenta-crusted roast rack of lamb”) or hopelessly wide-ranging (“serve with red meats, stews and casseroles”).   I don’t find either of those approaches particularly helpful, but now, having set out my objections, I have set myself the task of coming up with some food and wine matches of my own – without being hoist by my own petard.

Domaine Paget Sparkling Rosé NV

This delicate but definitively pink fizz conjures up peach melba, with its aromas and flavours of peach and raspberry.  Just off-dry, it nevertheless has a dryish, peppery finish after the fruit salad flavours.  This is an easy-going, flavourful sparkler and I would frankly be happy to drink a glass of this on its own, or with pre-dinner nibbles.

Led by the flavours of the wine, I first assembled a post-modern peach melba of nectarine, raspberry and peppercorns, which was perfectly delicious with the wine – however, this falls at the first hurdle I set out above (too specific).  And at the end of the day, would you really dish this up at the dinner table?

I decided to go for a more free-form kind of match, allying the fun and user-friendly robustness of the wine to the food that went with it.  What I came up with was an Anglo-French culinary mash-up:  bangers and French bean vinaigrette salad.

The salad is the kind of thing you’d find all over France on bistro menus – still hot, cooked French beans mixed into a punchy, mustardy vinaigrette with a finely-chopped garlic clove and a few capers.  The cooling beans take up the flavours of the dressing and their vivid green contrasts nicely with the toad-skin coloured capers.  The sharpness of the vinaigrette brings out the sweetness of the beans.

On this occasion I plonked a couple of sausages alongside the beans but, frankly, the meat involved is not that important.  I liked the way the sweet meatiness of the bangers rubbed along with the hint of sweetness in the wine.  Usually I’d go for a red wine with sausages, but the pink sparkling stood up to this combination pretty well, bouncing off the zingy vinaigrette.

But overall, what made this work well was the feel of the wine and food together – fun, no nonsense, unpretentious and uncomplicated, yet making the whole thing more of an occasion.  That’s what I call a successful food and wine match.

Calvet Touraine Sauvignon Blanc 2012

Touraine Sauvignon Blanc must be one of the best value for money wines around.  Lacking the cachet of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé, or the familiarity of Kiwi Sauvignon, in Touraine you tend to get more wine for your money.

This one has a delicious nettley, floral aroma, followed by a zippy and zesty lemon palate, with a bit of lemon pith on the finish.  If you are looking for a wine to accompany fish and chips (or, even better, whitebait), this is your man.  However, I went down the route of a salad that I first came across in the Paris neighbourhood bar/restaurant that served as the office canteen for my place of work.  I can’t remember what it was called on the menu, but now I call it egg and bacon salad.

This is quick to knock together:  boil some eggs, grill some smoked streaky bacon until crisp and make a classic vinaigrette dressing.  Break the bacon up into bite-sized bits, toss everything together with plenty of young spinach leaves and the egg and that’s it.  What makes this work is grating the boiled egg – it sounds odd, but it really helps the egg to combine with the vinaigrette dressing and to get in amongst the spinach leaves.  I’ve never tried grating egg with anything other than one of these rotary graters, which holds the egg for you, avoiding grated fingers and eggs shooting around the kitchen.

Egg is renowned as a tricky ingredient for wine and so are earthy spinach leaves, but the Sauvignon managed not to clash with either.  In fact something (the sharpness of the dressing and salty bacon I think) brought out the weight of the fruit even more, making this a really delicious match.

But is it too specific?  I think the dressing is the key here, as I’ve also enjoyed Loire Sauvignons with salade niçoise which, other than the egg, has not much in common with the egg and bacon salad.  So if you’re having vinaigrette, think about giving a Touraine Sauvignon a go.

Stockist information

Domaine Paget Sparkling Rosé NV - £12.25 from Berry Bros & Rudd

Calvet Touraine Sauvignon Blanc 2012 - £8.99 from Tesco

Camping it up in style

Camping and wine are two of my passions.  Should someone want to fund research in this area, I would volunteer readily to analyse the differences in taste perceptions of the same wines when drunk indoors, versus in the open air or under canvas.

Anyone who doubts that where you drink a wine makes a difference, has only to consider the heightened effect of drinking beer while sheltering in a marquee while it rains outside.  The drumming of the raindrops on the damp canvas and the mingling aromas of the beer with muddy grass trodden underfoot combine to make this a richer sensory experience than just downing a pint at the pub.  Add a packet of ready salted crisps and you have a perfect tableau of quintessential Britishness.

As with beer, so with wine.  At least, that is my thesis.  To kickstart what will undoubtedly become a long and detailed research project, I am road (or in my case, camper van) testing a couple of wines to see how they fare in the great outdoors – and what food will set them off to a T.

Beaujolais La Forêt 2011

Beaujolais is a great wine to have by your side on a camping trip – it has bright fruit flavours that stand up well to outdoor consumption and is best served lightly chilled – which shouldn’t pose a problem this summer.  Best of all, this one has a screwcap, so no danger of “I thought you had the corkscrew” misery.

Tasted indoors, aromas of raspberry and cherry leap from the glass.  The balanced acidity and modest alcohol (12.5%) make for great freshness, allied to zesty, cranberry fruit.  This feels so lively and refreshing that you feel like it must be doing you some good.

Outdoors, the upfront fruit flavours are somewhat muted and I noticed the tannins (which hadn’t registered at all indoors) – so the structure of the wine came more to the fore, but the fruit was still there in abundance.

What to eat with this wine?  Beaujolais is a truly versatile wine style.  I tried this with a lamb curry (pretty hot, slightly sweet and sharp) and while many red wines would become actively unpleasant with it, this coped admirably.  More traditionally I also paired it with a Spanish-inspired Puy lentil warm salad with red onion, dressed with hot smoked paprika vinaigrette.  This is a doddle to knock up on the road, requiring only one ring to cook the lentils, plus a bit of chopping.  The Beaujolais’ vibrant fruit and crunchy acidity went perfectly with the earthiness of the lentils.

But the top match for camper van eating was a bacon sarnie – a staple of any camping trip.  In a nod towards five a day I made it a BLT, but even so the Beaujolais did a great job of cutting through the fat and saltiness of the bacon, while retaining its fruity personality.

Le Petit Salvard Cheverny, Emmanuel Delaille 2011

If there’s one grape that evokes cut grass is has to be Sauvignon Blanc, so it evokes the outdoor life even when you’re drinking it on a rainy November evening.  This wine, from the small Cheverny Appellation in the Loire Valley, has 15% Chardonnay alongside the Sauvignon.

In the great outdoors the aromas are all Sauvignon Blanc:  gooseberry and blackcurrant leaf (I’ve been picking them today, so they’re fresh in the mind).  When you taste, the little bit of Chardonnay in the wine seems to tame the Sauvignon’s more pungent flavours, leaving pure, limey fruit and giving some more weight, without cutting down on the refreshment.

Back inside, I noticed more delicate elderflower aromas and the wine felt more rounded and somehow less vibrant.  I definitely preferred the experience of drinking this outside on a warm evening.

Salade niçoise is a regular on the menu for our family trips to France in the camper van.  Cooking the potatoes, French beans and eggs can be a bit of a fag, but the result is so tasty and so beautiful (to my eye anyway), that it’s worth the effort.  The Cheverny stood up brilliantly to all those flavours that combine in the salad – salty olives and capers, ripe tomatoes, egg, tuna and not least a punchy mustard-heavy vinaigrette.  It retained all of its freshness and provided juicy refreshment – dangerously drinkable in fact.

My research has got off to a fine start and I’m eager to get on with more over the course of this summer.  A bientôt!

Beaujolais La Forêt 2011 is available from Waitrose at £7.59

Le Petit Salvard Cheverny, Emmanuel Delaille, 2010 is available from Waitrose and Ocado at around £9

Wine of the week

Now, it may be tipping it down today, but rumour has it that we might actually get a sunny day, or even two this weekend. So, to get in the mood, have a try of my wine of the week.

Leyda Single Vineyard Garuma Sauvignon Blanc 2007, Leyda Valley, Chile
Stockists - Waitrose £8.99, Great Western Wine have the 2006 vintage for £9.50
I know, I know - a Chilean sauvignon, how very original - not. Wait though, this one has more to recommend it than most at this price level.

Partly this is to do with where it's grown - the Leyda Valley is one of the most recently-planted and most northerly in Chile. Now, Chile being in the southern hemisphere, the further north you go, the nearer the Equator and, therefore the warmer you get, right? Well, uh, no.... It seems the cold, cold Pacific has more of an influence here (13km from the vineyards) than latitude and Leyda is actually a cool-climate area, perfectly suited to producing crisp, aromatic white wines.

This has plenty of lime zesty fruit, with a distinctive peapod/asparagus tinge, which sauvignons often develop as they age. Not remotely thin or weedy, but with mouthwatering juicy fruit, it can more than stand up to, say, barbecued prawns with chilli and ginger. Ooh, now I'm getting hungry...