Seabream carpaccio with blood orange and Hugel Gentil

If you’re pairing a wine with a raw starter like carpaccio you might think your choice needs to be dictated by the fish but as with other ingredients it depends what else is on the plate.

As part of a tasting menu at Caper and Cure in Bristol it came with oyster, mayonnaise, smoked caviar, mooli and blood orange but it was the orange in particular that kicked it into touch with the 2021 Hugel Gentil we had ordered.

‘Gentil’ is an unusual wine from Alsace - a officially recognised category of wine  which has to be at least 50% Riesling, Muscat, Pinot Gris and/or Gewurztraminer (this version from Hugel also contains a significant amount of Sylvaner).

It’s not as heavily scented as gewürztraminer or as sweet as muscat but definitely aromatic yet it worked really well with the dish. It also matches, as you might expect, with many Chinese, Indian and Thai dishes.

You can buy the 2022 vintage from Tanners for £15.20 or from Taurus for £15.49.

I was invited to Caper and Cure for the launch of their new menu but contributed towards the cost of the meal and the wine.

Chocolate and muscadel

There hasn’t been much food and wine pairing going on in the Beckett household this week as I lost my sense of taste with Covid - fortunately for only four days - but I tasted a wine yesterday that I know would make the perfect match with chocolate.

It’s a South African sweet red wine called Muscadel aka muscat and it’s not widely available in the UK but you can buy it as part of the Banks Brothers range.

What I particularly like about it is that it’s bottled young and at a lower ABV than port which gives it a really lovely fresh berry fruit flavour that would be great with chocolate.

At £19.50 for three 250ml cans it’s not cheap but it would make a perfect Easter treat to give someone along with their Easter egg. You can also buy it by the bottle. Frontier Fine Wines sells the Rustenberg for £10.50 a half bottle. It would be good to see more of it here.

Photo ©Jessica Loaiza on Unsplash

Saint-Nectaire with Domaine Matassa Cuvée Alexandria 2012, Côtes Catalanes

While orange wines are becoming more common I’m still not sure most people know when and with what to drink them so here’s a pairing that worked really well from a dinner I hosted for Bar Buvette, one of my favourite Bristol haunts, last week.

The wine (which gets its colour from leaving the grape juice in contact with the skins, not from actual oranges) came from Domaine Matassa in the Roussillon and is made from Muscat of Alexandria, hence the name. The estate is run organically and biodynamically so it’s very much a natural wine though with an exotic taste of grapes and quince (so delicous and not scary at all).

I have to hand it to the bar’s owner Peter Taylor for suggesting we drink it with the cheese - I’d have probably gone for the main course of lamb which also tends to work well with orange wine (think lamb and quince) but it was a real winner with the aged Saint-Nectaire.

You can buy it for £20 from Les Caves de Pyrène though I suspect other orange wines would work well too.

See these other good pairings for Saint-Nectaire

Duck tagine and Moscatel

I certainly feel duck’s status as one of the best ingredients to pair with wine has been enhanced by this week’s match of the week

It was one of the main two courses at the latest session of the monthly wine club I’m running with Itamar Srulovich and his wife Sarit at Honey & Co and as ever with those two was incredibly inventive: basically a duck tagine with clementines and apricots toped with kadaif pastry - an ultra-exotic duck pie for which I hope they’ll at some point give the recipe!

It went well with a number of the full-bodied white wines we tried with it but I particularly liked it with the headily aromatic 2013 De Martino Moscatel Viejas Tinajas from Chile which is aged in clay amphorae (a pairing that makes sense when you think how well duck goes with gewurztraminer). It also went really well with an Austrian Rülander (also an orange wine), an oaked white rioja, a white Crozes Hermitage and - most surprisingly to me - a lush Newton Johnson chardonnay from Hemel-en-Aarde in South Africa

You can currently buy the 2014 vintage of the moscatel from Les Caves de Pyrène at £14.20 a bottle, Joseph Barnes Wines Direct at £15.50 and £15.99 from Handford Wines.

NB We won’t be holding a wine club in February but will be starting a new series in March. If you’d like to know when the dates and themes are confirmed send your email address to events@matchingfoodandwine.com and we’ll put you on our mailing list.