Gazpacho, oak-smoked tomatoes and smoked vodka

I love it when a restaurant lays on an imaginative drink pairing and this was a terrific one from Ben Cooke at Little Gloster just outside Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

He had entered the dish - a yellow gazpacho made with Isle of Wight tomatoes, horseradish and crème fraîche topped with a crostino with mozzarella and oak-smoked tomato into a competition run by Chase Vodka - the Chase Smoky Mary - and won it.

The dish was strongly flavoured enough to carry the powerful flavour of the smoked vodka which was served as a frozen shot. It paired particularly well - as you might expect - with the smoked tomato.

It was only because it was such a good pairing that it pushed aside the other combination I might have made my match of the week - also at Little Gloster: a Ciu Ciu Le Merlettaie pecorino* with a starter of skordalia, grilled aubergines and courgettes. Garlicky dips are great with crisp fresh zesty whites. A Greek assyrtiko would have worked too.

*You can buy the 2014 vintage from The Good Wine Shop at £11.50 at the time of writing.

I ate at Little Gloster as a guest of the restaurant.

Spiced parsnip soup with Harviestoun Bitter and Twisted

Although I’ve tasted some good wines this week it’s beer that has provided the highlights. The Magic Rock Rapture amber ale I drank at The Pint Shop in Cambridge with their awesome beer brined chicken was pretty good but it’s pipped into the ‘drink of the week’ slot by this pairing at The Hole in the Wall in Little Wilbraham

It was the first course of a tasting menu: a spiced parsnip soup with warm pork rillettes and some julienne strips of apple, a perfect contrast to Harviestoun’s Bitter and Twisted a smooth, slightly sweet 4.2% blonde ale which picked up perfectly on the sweetness of the parsnip and savouriness of the rillettes.

Soups are quite difficult to match with drinks - one liquid with another never seems entirely appropriate - but with some ingredients like root vegetables beer does a better job than wine.

The pairing was one of a number of immensely clever pairings by the restaurant’s sommelier Joel Servy who (unusually for a Frenchman!) turns out to be quite a beer aficionado, albeit the other matches were wines.

You can read more about the Hole in the Wall - a strong recommendation if you’re staying in Cambridge or want a day out of London - in my latest restaurant review here.

Chilled cucumber and garlic soup and Chenin Blanc

On Saturday, as I mentioned in my blog, I was at a food and wine festival in Constantia, where we wandered round the impossibly beautiful Buitenverwachting estate sipping wine and grazing on upmarket canapés devised by a selection of the area's best local chefs. Not a bad way to spend an afternoon ....

The food was great, not least this chilled cucumber and garlic soup. which had a heck of a lot of raw garlic in it which made it so spicy I suspected it had also been spiked with chilli. (Apparently not but the South Africans certainly like their garlic - we had a white garlic soup the same evening in Cape Town which was equally ferocious.)

So, cucumber, garlic, dill, yoghurt (or sour cream, maybe). What do you drink with it?Something crisp, something cold, something dry . . . Could easily have been Sauvignon Blanc but I actually went for the Chenin Blanc that was conveniently to hand - a fresh-tasting, zesty 2013 Kloof Street Chenin from Mullineux up in the Swartland region which hit the spot perfectly.

Young unoaked South African Chenin pairs with very similar food to Sauvignon Blanc as you can see in this post: Which food to pair with South African Chenin Blanc.

Parsley soup, snails and Muscadet!

Not the most appealing food and wine pairing you may think but I have to assure you it was delicious! It was at the newly opened Berners Tavern which is run by chef-of-the-moment Jason Atherton.

I’d dropped by for an early lunch before a tasting I was doing so decided to eat from the starter menu and it was the soup - a Caroll’s potato and parsley soup, Dorset snails, Stornaway black pudding and Breville brioche toastie, to give it its full title - that really caught my eye, not least because of the idea of eating a 70s-style toastie in a posh restaurant.

As you can see the parsley gave it an amazing deep green colour, the perfect balance to the savoury snails and black pudding. And the Muscadet - a 2010 Muscadet de Sèvre et Maine sure Lie from Domaine du Verger which they sell by the glass - had just the right crisp, clean flavour to cut through. (It would match equally well with the French classic of snails with garlic butter I reckon.)

I also tried it with a couple of oysters dressed with a Vietnamese dressing - interestingly not as good as oysters served au naturel.

By the way I’d recommend Berners Tavern if you’re looking for somewhere impressive to eat off Oxford Street. It’s not cheap but it’s one of those clever menus that has something for everyone and is an absolutely gorgeous room.