A rich jus and Ju de Vie

You’d think a rich winey sauce or jus would be the easiest thing to match with red wine but that isn’t necessarily the case as it tends to compete with it.

In this case the jus was particularly intense - accompanying a braised featherblade of beef in a fantastic dish from Gary Usher’s Elite Bistros at Home takeaway menu.

I was sent it - and a couple of other dishes* - by my pal Mike Boyne of Bin Two in Padstow together with matching wines in frustration at not being able to get together for a meal this year. The Ju de vie is from Julien Mus of Domaine de la Graveirett, a biodynamic producer in the Rhone and classified as a vin de France due to the unusual blend of merlot, marselan, grenache and mourvèdre.

Although it was 14% there was a freshness and savouriness to it that offset the sweet richness of the sauce (also due to being aged in concrete tanks rather than oak) and I was thinking that if you’d served a Napa cabernet or Barossa shiraz with it it would just have been too much.

It also went really well with a coq au vin I made the following night.(Yup, it has been a really indulgent couple of days and Christmas hasn’t even started yet. Still, we all need cheering up this year, don’t we?)

You can buy the Ju de Vie from Mike at Bin Two for £15.50.

* Braised octopus with morcilla and chickpeas with a brilliant Georgian orange wine called Teliani Valley Kakhuri No 8 and banana cake with butterscotch sauce and candied pecans with the 2017 MAD Tokaji late harvest wine both great pairings too.

Slow-cooked beef cheek and Cotes du Rhone

There’s so much inexpensive Côtes du Rhône about that it’s easy to forget that it can be a sufficiently substantial wine to take on a richly flavoured dish, especially if it comes from a named village and a good vintage.

The dish, which we had at Clarette in Marylebone, was a main course of slow cooked beef cheek with a luxuriant olive oil-based mash, onion and bone marrow - the charred onion really adding to the success of the pairing.

And the wine? The powerful Domaine des Maravilhas, Maestral Rouge 2015, Côtes du Rhône Villages Laudun (a classic blend of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre) which comes from a biodynamically run estate. It doesn't retail in the UK but obviously a similar style of Côtes du Rhône would work equally well.

I ate at Clarette as a guest of Inter Rhône