Pappardelle with beef shin and Barolo

It’s not often that I choose from a menu based on the wine I’m drinking but then I don’t often drink wines good enough to justify that - in restaurants at least where mark-ups tend to make the best wines unaffordable.

However my friend, wine merchant Raj Soni of R S Wines, had brought along such a good bottle to the newly opened Bianchis in Bristol - a magnum of Cavallotto Barolo Riserva Bricco Boschis Vigna San Giuseppe 2004 - that it would have been rude not to do it justice.

I actually chose a main course that had been cooked in another wine - a pasta dish of beef shin ragu braised in Chianti which proved to be the perfect match, intense enough to show off the opulent, silky Barolo but not to overwhelm it.

The conventional wisdom is that you should drink the same type of wine you use to cook a dish but this pairing proves that doesn’t have to be the case.

Salsa verde and Chianti Classico

Wine pairing is much more about the way you cook a dish and the sauce you serve with it than it is about the basic ingredient and so it proved with this week’s match at the recently opened Brackenbury.

It was a dish of roast skrei cod with a potato, radicchio and sage bake and salsa verde, a punchy sauce of parsley, mint, olive oil, anchovy and capers* with which the elegant young Selvapiana Chianti Rufina we had chosen paired perfectly.

There was in fact quite a lot going on in the dish that assisted the match. The fact that the cod was roasted. The radicchio and sage - both slightly bitter - and the smoothing effect of the potato but it was the tangy salsa verde that clinched it.

Note: one of the reasons it worked was because the wine was both dry and lean. The salsa would have made a riper, more full-bodied red taste much sweeter, most likely unbalancing both the wine and the match.

Obviously the wine would work just as well, if not better, if the sauce had been served with lamb or veal.

* There’s a video of Danny Bohan of the River Cafe making a salsa verde here

For my full review of The Brackenbury click here.

Image © koss13 - Fotolia.com

Tuscan bean soup and Sangiovese

Last week I was on an assignment in Tuscany for a couple of days. It was pretty hot but that didn’t discourage the Tuscans from serving the kind of food they enjoy all the year round - namely substantial bean and chickpea soups.

They’re particularly good because they make them from scratch from the best quality pulses which gives them a rich, sweet, mealy texture that is a quite marvellous foil for the local wines, which are almost all based on Sangiovese. Chianti is the best known of them but we tried others such as Montecucco and Morellino di Scansano. They all share the typically high acidity of inexpensive Italian reds which makes them taste slightly thin on their own by modern standards but absolutely perfect with lighter dishes such as soup and pasta.

More on this tomorrow!