Match of the week

Tea-smoked duck with beetroot jelly and Bandol

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on April 16 2012 at 08:53

We may have got rid of the old convention of white wine with fish and red wine with meat but you’d still expect to drink a light wine with a starter and a more robust wine with your main course, non? Well not when it’s tea-smoked duck as I discovered at a great meal at one of our local Bristol restaurants, Riverstation in Bristol last week.

We’d been having a tasting with Jason Yapp of Yapp Brothers so had a fair number of bottles on the table to play with. The Bandol, a dense, rich, plummy Mas de la Rouvière 2007 from Domaine Bunan, didn’t look the most likely candidate but once I’d tasted the dish which had a really smokey edge I knew i had to try it.

It went brilliantly which goes to show if you want to drink Bandol right through a meal start with tea-smoked duck - or perhaps other smoked meats like venison. The slightly earthy taste of the beetroot helped too. (I’ll try and prise the recipe out of them.)

Apologies for not posting a pic of the dish. It wasn't my starter but my husband’s and as he was down the other end of the table he’d eaten most of it by the time I’d got to it.

The Bandol is £17.25 a bottle, btw. Expensive but worth it. It would be fantastic with a barbecued butterflied leg of lamb too.

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