Match of the week

Beef carpaccio and chardonnay

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on March 28 2022 at 16:42

Beef and chardonnay doesn’t sound like an obvious combo at first glance but it depends, as always, how the beef is cooked.

This was in the form of a carpaccio at a Californian Wines tasting and lunch at Smith & Wollensky just off the Strand but the key was not so much the meat as the parmesan, truffle and truffle oil which anointed it all of which are immensely chardonnay-friendly

I tried a couple of different wines with it but particularly liked the Staglin Family’s 2019 Salus estate chardonnay which had a lovely freshness about it that counterbalanced its richness and weight. Sadly at £50 a bottle (at The Champagne Company) or £58 at Oddbins it isn’t cheap - Californian chardonnay, especially from the Napa Valley ,doesn’t tend to be - but you could pull the same trick with a full-bodied chardonnay from elsewhere - and even truffle oil rather than the real thing.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of California Wines

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