Vidal icewine with feta and honey cheesecake

It’s always satisfying when a challenging food and wine hit it off and both cheesecake and icewine undoubtedly present their problems.

Cheesecake is super-rich which calls for an accompanying dessert wine with enough weight but also enough fresh acidity to balance it while icewine is so sweet it can easily feel like overkill to even try to eat anything with it.

We were determined to showcase Sarit’s incredibly delicious feta and honey cheesecake though at our Honey & Co wine club on Sunday so took a punt on a Pillitteri Vidal icewine from Canada from - surprise, surprise - Lidl as the other dessert wines we’d tried just tasted thin with it. And it was fantastic! Luscious but not cloying.

You really should make the cheesecake* which is in their first book Honey & Co: Food from the Middle East. And buy the icewine which is a bargainous £14.99.

A word of warning - I can’t guarantee that icewine will go with every cheesecake - I suspect it mightn't if it was a toffee cheesecake and probably not with a chocolate one either but you never know. You can see some of my other cheesecake pairings here - and on the Pillitteri website. (Incidentally they have icewine festivals in Canada. How fun does that sound?)

* the other dessert shown in the pic was a chocolate, orange and pecan slice which went brilliantly well with a Tokaji

Sweetcorn, feta and green chilli waffles and pink grapefruit juice

Soft drinks don’t often feature in my weekly pairings but this combination of an inventive savoury breakfast waffle and some lovely fresh pink grapefruit juice at The Modern Pantry last week was spot on.

The waffle, which contained sweetcorn, feta, green chilli and curry leaf and was topped with crisp maple-cured (I think) bacon had that sweet/sour/spicy character that features in so many of chef Anna Hansen’s dishes and the pink grapefruit juice with its own sweet/sharp notes was the ideal match.

I think pink grapefruit juice is perhaps the easiest citrus to pair without the tartness of lemon and lime which frequently needs a correcting dose of sugar but fresher and less filling than orange juice. (Incidentally it was interesting that they’d filtered out the ‘bits’ or shreds of fruit pulp that so many people dislike)

It was also great with the sugar prawn omelette that my breakfast companion Signe Johansen ordered, one of the signature dishes at the restaurant.

Roast lamb with wild garlic risotto, asparagus and feta with a chilled Languedoc red

This match, which I enjoyed at Plateau wine bar in Brighton last week, breaks a couple of wine pairing conventions. Firstly that you match red meat with a full bodied red. And secondly that you don’t drink red wine with asparagus.

But in fact the grassy notes of the asparagus and the accompanying wild garlic risotto were just perfect with this natural, slightly mineral blend of mourvèdre and grenache called Les Fainéants produced by Opi d’Aqui just outside Clermont l’Herault. As they would be with a lightly chilled Loire Cabernet Franc. (The saltiness of the feta helped too.)

I also had a lamb tagine this week with a natural red from the Côtes du Brian in the Minervois which was an equally good match. What natural wine naysayers should at least acknowledge is that fresh-tasting reds without excessive extraction or tannin are great with food.

To read about the other restaurants I visited in Brighton click here and for a longer list of asparagus pairings, here.