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.

Paella with pork, chorizo and spinach and palo cortado sherry

There’s still a tendency to think of sherry as an aperitif or just for drinking with tapas but it can go really well with a more substantial dish as I was reminded this week.

One of my Zoom cooking groups had decided to cook from the Moro cookbook, which was, incredibly, published back in 2001 but still feels really fresh and relevant.

I made a dish which they describe as a paella but which is more like a typical Spanish ‘arroz’ dish made without tomatoes, saffron or seafood. The key ingredients were pork, chorizo and spinach (I substituted chard) but the element which made it so particularly delicious was the slow cooked umami-rich onions and peppers. There was also a spicy note from the pimenton and cascabel chillies which I used as a substitute for the dried nora peppers recommended in the dish but probably needed cooking rather longer than the 15/20 minutes it took to cook the rice.

I tried a couple of reds with it but settled in the end for a glass of Hidalgo’s fabulous Wellington 20 year old palo cortado which chimed in perfectly with all the deep savoury flavours. Amazingly it had been open for weeks but was still wonderfully rich and nutty. You can buy it from indies such as Eynsham Cellars for £28-30 a bottle but Waitrose does a decent own label one for £11.99. A dry amontillado would work too.

I have to say that Spanish rice dishes are a lot easier than risottos (or should that be risotti?) as you don’t have to stir them. And equally, if not more tasty.

For other palo cortado and amontillado pairings click here.

Cozido and Cortello

We went to a Portuguese evening at a local cafe, Tart in Bristol last week, which does a monthly supper club. The food was great, especially a main course of cozido, a substantial, saffron-laced stew of chicken, pork, chorizo and beans that would have actually made a meal in itself.

With it we drank a Portuguese red of great personality called Cortello, a well-priced blend of Aragonez and Castelao, which comes from the Lisbon region. It was quite light but had plenty of structure to stand up to the stew. Interestingly I thought it went better than a fuller-bodied Dao of the same vintage. Saffron seems to have the effect of accentuating wood in a wine.

The wines were provided by a new Bristol wine merchant Grape & Grind run by Darren Willis who used to work at London wine merchant Philglas & Swiggott. It has a really interesting range.

Salt cod with chorizo and Cabernet - yes, Cabernet!

Few these days dispute that red wine goes with fish - it’s just a question of which wine and how the fish is cooked. Most would accept ‘meaty' steak lookalikes like grilled or spiced tuna or salmon work with Pinot Noir but would hesitate to take it much further than that but last week I found a couple of surprisingly good fish matches at one of my favourite new wine bars 28-50.

The wine was an inexpensive 2008 Vin de Pays from Domaine Les Filles de Septembre* from the Languedoc’s Cotes de Thongue - their cuvée Dana which surprisingly turned out to be a 70/30% blend of Cabernet and Merlot. I say surprisingly because it actually tasted more like a Syrah - you could certainly pick up a violet note in it and it had a delicious suppleness to it which you don’t often find in a Cab. That’s terroir for you - although it is of course perfectly possible that it did contain a proportion of unannounced Syrah.

There were four of us and it was fine with all of our mains, two of them fishy. The most successful match was with a dish of salt cod and chorizo but it also paired unexpectedly well with a red mullet bouillabaisse, more predictably with a dish of pigs' cheeks and even survived a pissaladire. Obviously one of those useful ‘take me anywhere’ wines. You can buy it from Yapp’s for £9.50 a bottle.

*Incidentally the name of the domaine comes from the fact that all the owners four daughters were born in September!