Cassoulet and red Bordeaux

One of the questions I regularly get asked is what to drink with a special bottle. The general expectation is that I’ll suggest a meal of Michelin-starred quality but as this match of the week shows a rustic dish will do very nicely.

The wine was a 2009 Cuvée Barthélemy from a biodynamic Bordeaux producer Château le Puy whose wines I’ve written about before. Although they could legitimately be classified as ‘natural’ they don’t taste at all funky but smooth, polished and, in the case of this particular bottle, still surprisingly vibrant for a 12 year old wine.

I pulled one out to drink with a slow braised lamb dish from the Towpath café cookbook I made on Saturday night which includes 3 heads (heads not cloves) of garlic but is cooked for so long it doesn’t taste overly garlicky.

Even better I drink the remainder of the bottle with an improvised cassoulet I made with some of the leftover lamb, some Judion beans, half the remaining confit garlic, a duck leg I serendipitously found in the freezer and some mini chorizos which would no doubt outrage any self respecting Toulousian.

Anyway the Barthélemy was gorgeous with it, retaining all its richness and suppleness and handling the (admittedly) mild heat of the chorizo really well. A real treat but sadly not a cheap one. The cost of the more recent vintages at Buon Vino which stocks most of their range is £125-145 a bottle but their more affordable cuvées should work too.

For other cassoulet pairings see Six of the best wine pairings with Cassoulet. You'll find the cassoulet recipe I normally make rather than this cheat's version here.

2009 Pessac-Léognan and a cheeseburger

Although I’ve visited posh St James’s wine club 67 Pall Mall several times for tastings I hadn't ever had lunch there until last week. I don’t know quite what I expected - perhaps the sort of roast and overcooked veg you’d find in a gentleman’s club but certainly not a rare burger in an airy brioche bun with perfectly cooked onion rings on the side.

The burger had quite a bit in the way of toppings including bacon and cheese but the wine my host had picked with it, a gloriously velvety 2009 La Chapelle de La Mission Haut-Brion, wasn’t thrown off its stride in the slightest.

It was a good ripe vintage of course but nevertheless a mature wine you might have thought wouldn’t stand up to a burger. I did avoid ketchup on the side though which is the real wine killer!

You can read more about the estate here.

See also:

Fine wine and fast food

Six of the best pairings for a burger

Smoked cods roe and Metissage

This week’s pairing is as much about the wine as the dish though the two went exceptionally well together.

Métissage is an unusual white wine from the Entre-Deux-Mers region in Bordeaux that has to be labelled vin de France because it includes riesling as well as sauvignon and a hybrid variety with the unsexy name of CAL 6 04 that has been bred to be resistant to disease. The producer Jonathan Ducourt reckons that it will enable them to reduce the number of treatments they have to give the vines to combat odium or powdery mildew, an endemic problem in the relatively humid climate of the region. (There’s a fuller description here)

Despite also including sauvignon blanc it’s not a typical Bordeaux white by any means - it’s quite floral and aromatic and I wasn’t sure I liked it when I tasted it on its own. But in one of those amazing transformations that can happen when you partner wine with food it was really fabulous with a very pretty dish of whipped cods roe, shallot and chervil that we were served at the Michelin-starred Portland where we later had lunch.

Riesling of course would work well too - better than sauvignon blanc on its own I think, possibly also Sylvaner from Alsace.

The wine isn’t widely available yet though interestingly Vins de Bordeaux, who were hosting the event, had no compunction about showing it - maybe to flag up that there are regulations in the pipeline to allow 10% of other grape varieties in a blend which will be interesting…

I hadn’t been to Portland for a while and the lunch reminded me how very good the food is - as it is at their sister restaurant Clipstone. Both also have excellent wine lists and are well worth a visit in the new year if you’re looking for somewhere central to meet.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Vins de Bordeaux.

Margaux and Turkish chicken with walnut sauce

There’s nothing I love more than a surprise when it comes to food and wine pairing and I would not in a million years have predicted that a pukka Bordeaux would go with this exotic Turkish dish.

I - and probably you - would more commonly stick to classics like roast beef and lamb with a bottle of Chateau Labégorce Zédé Margaux 2005 but untroubled by convention my friend had cooked an intriguing dish of chicken with a thick walnut sauce. It was the rich earthiness and slight bitterness of the walnuts that set the wine off to perfection. It became even more velvety and plummy - an absolute treat.

She didn’t have a recipe - she’d more or less made it up - but I’m thinking it’s probably quite like this recipe from Sabrina Ghayour. Anyway I’m going to try it. The only thing you’d need to be careful about is the kind of sides you put with it. We had simply cooked vegetables from the garden which I think assisted the match rather than exotic Turkish vegetable dishes and salads

Sadly the wine no longer exists. The estate decided not to bottle it separately from 2009 according to this report from Decanter but there seem to be a fair few old vintages knocking around if you can find them at fine wine retailers such as Crump. Richmond and Shaw (and I suspect traditional country wine merchants)