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

Like wine for chocolate

Easter is just around the corner and for many of us that means chocolate. Chocolate eggs of all shapes and sizes, chocolate bunnies, boxes of chocolate, chocolate anything in fact, and lots of it.

This got me thinking about wine and chocolate – not a natural combination you might think - and you’re probably right. Chocolate is quite a challenge for any alcoholic drink, with its dense, rich sweetness, its sheer “sticks around in your mouth for ages”-ness. Most of the time I’d probably go for a cup of tea, or coffee, if I’m eating some chocolate. But in the interests of research I have been looking around for wines that might just work with the dark stuff.

Which leads me to the first issue – chocolate is such a broad term. There’s a world of difference between your Cadbury’s Dairy Milk and your 70% cocoa solids plain chocolate; what might go with an airy, creamy milk chocolate mousse is probably not going to suit a dark chocolate roulade with raspberry coulis. Chocolate itself has different characters – and, to add to the complexity, we love to use it in all manner of puddings, sweets, biscuits and to combine it with cream, nuts, fruit – you name it.

So chocolate and wine combinations have more to them than meets the eye. Here are some suggestions, based on the type of chocolate you’re dealing with.

White chocolate
White chocolate is hardly chocolate in some ways, as it contains no cocoa as such, just cocoa butter, vanilla and masses of sugar of course. This makes it the lightest and sweetest type of chocolate which needs a light and sweet wine to match.

A fun option would be a Moscato d’Asti, from Piedmont in Italy. It’s lightly sparkling, light in alcohol (only 5-6%) and definitely sweet – could there be a more unfashionable combination in a wine? Treat it as a guilty pleasure – it might be uncool, but its sweet, grapey, pear-tinged bubbles are a delight with white chocolate puddings (as well as fruit salads, incidentally). Oddbins have Michele Chiarlo’s Moscato d’Asti “Nivole” at £9.99 for a half bottle. A less refined version of this is available as wines labelled “Asti” rather than “Moscato d’Asti”: the most widely distributed version is Asti Martini NV, £5.96 from Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose.

Milk chocolate and light chocolate puddings
If you’re planning on helping the children finish their supply of milk chocolate eggs, then you could do worse than try a glass of tawny port to go with it.

All port starts out life as a deep-coloured red wine, whose fermentation is stopped by the addition of grape spirit, leaving a fortified, naturally sweet wine as a result. Ruby port, the regular stuff, is aged for a short time in barrel, then bottled while it is still deepest ruby and full of brambly fruit. This style of port also has its uses with chocolate – I’d be tempted to try it with unadulterated plain chocolate, as well as with dark chocolate puddings that involve berry fruits.

The tawny version of port has a lighter, yes tawny, colour, brought about by long term ageing in barrel. As the wine loses its deep colour, it takes on a more mellow, nutty character, making it a remarkably versatile drink, one that can stand up to milk chocolate and lighter chocolate puddings.

That nutty character would also make a nice match with chocolate sweets involving nuts…chocolate brownies, perhaps?

Look for an aged tawny, at least 10 years old: the older the wine, the more mellow and complex it will be. A good introduction to the style is Warre’s Otima 10 year old Tawny Port, £11.99 for 50cl at Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda, Thresher/Wine Rack and Waitrose.

An interesting twist on the tawny port style is Mavrodaphne of Patras (in Greece), available for £4.99 at Waitrose. This is made in the same way as port, but from the splendidly-named Mavrodaphne grape, native to Greece. It has also been aged in casks, giving it that hallmark caramelly flavour with a hint of spice. I recently enjoyed this wine with a seemingly difficult to match pud involving milk chocolate mousse in a cup of dark chocolate with raspberries on top – the Mavrodaphne took all this in its stride.

Dark chocolate and rich, dark chocolate puddings
These can be some of the most difficult things to pair with wine, because of their full-on flavours and richness. You might come across some surprising matches, however.

I unexpectedly enjoyed Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise with posh dark chocolates. Not sure if I can explain why. The wine is a lightly fortified sweet white wine made from the same grape as the Moscato mentioned above and I can only deduce that somewhere between the sweet fruit of the wine and the rich bitterness of the chocolates, some harmony was reached. Tesco and Waitrose both stock Muscat de Beaumes-de-Venise made by the winegrowers’ co-operative for around £5.50 for a 50cl bottle.

A more mainstream solution is to echo the chocolatey richness and slight bitterness of the food with a wine with similar traits. Ruby port could work here, as could wines from Maury or Banyuls in the Southwest of France. Another form of sweet, fortified red wine made in a similar way to port – who knew there were so many of these things around? – the young versions of these wines combine a bitter chocolate character with a trace of black fruit. If this sounds like the pudding you’re eating, then give a Maury or Banyuls a go. Waitrose have Domaine Pouderoux Maury 2002/3 for £9.99 for 50cl.

In all these matches I’m obeying the food and wine matching premise that the wine should be sweeter than the food that you’re eating. I’m generally not a fan of rules when it comes to choosing wines, but I find wines that are less sweet than what I’m eating end up tasting overly dry and lacking fruit.

However, it’s horses for courses and people who baulk at the idea of any sweet wine might prefer to have a dry red with chocolate. Again, it makes sense to look for wines which have plenty of ripe, dark fruit with a hint of chocolate flavour – full-on Zinfandels from California are often touted as a good chocolate companion. I would also recommend trying an Amarone from Italy: these wines are made from partly dried grapes, which gives a full-bodied wine with masses of dark, ripe black cherry fruit and an edge of bitter chocolate. Not a cheap option (£20 and up), but Phil Jones of The Vineyard in Dorking is a fan of the style and should be able to point you in the right direction.

The richest, sweetest chocolate puddings are quite possibly beyond the reach of most wines…except one. Liqueur muscats from Australia are a unique wine style and a gift from Australia to the rest of the wine world. Muscat grapes (I’m intrigued how often this grape variety is cropping up here) are harvested late, when they have begun to shrivel and raisin on the vine. The grapes are part-fermented, then fortified to produce, port-style, a sweet, fortified wine. Aged in casks in tin-roofed huts under the hot Australian sun, these syrupy wines turn dark in colour, with a spectrum of flavours including figs, marmalade, treacle, nuts…I could go on. Not wimpy wines, they can stand up to just about any pudding you care to throw at them.

Majestic stock De Bortoli Show Liqueur Muscat for £11.99 a bottle. A step up in quality, though, is Stanton and Killeen Classic Rutherglen Muscat, £13.15 for a half bottle at Waitrose.

And finally…if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, try an Australian sparkling shiraz. These wines are never serious, but can be serious fun – and their full-on sweet, black fruit with notes of dark chocolate give a clue that they might just work with puddings. You can pick up Jacob’s Creek Sparkling Shiraz at Sainsbury’s for £8.98 and Banrock Station Sparkling Shiraz is £8.79 at Waitrose.

If all that sounds a little overwhelming, remember it’s hard to beat the great British cuppa with anything sweet.