Beef stew and oloroso sherry

Last week I was at the Copa Jerez, an international wine and food competition where teams pair a 3 course menu with sherry.

(I judged the UK competition last year which was won by Gail Ge’er Li and Jaichen Lu of Dinings SW3 whose pairing of braised beef tongue and oloroso sherry I wrote about here.)

The ultimate trophy this year was won by Parsley Salon of Copenhagen in Denmark who also presented an oloroso as their main course pairing.

We enjoyed oloroso a couple of other times during the three days we were in Jerez, in both cases with a beef stew. As a ‘racion’ (more substantial tapa) at Valdespino and as the main course of beef cheek at an utterly splendid dinner at Lustau where they paired it with their Colleción Almacenista Garcia Jacana Oloroso Pata Gallina which you can buy from Waitrose Cellar for £22.99 a 50cl bottle.

Most of us obviously think of drinking red with a dish like that but if there were just the two of you - and you were both sherry fans - a glass of oloroso would be the perfect accompaniment. (Many supermarkets do excellent half bottles for less than this, quite often made by Lustau. Morrisons has one for £6.50 for example)

I attended Copa Jerez as a guest of the organisers

Beef tongue and dry oloroso sherry

I’ve been sitting on this pairing (not literally) for a couple of weeks now but thought I’d bring it out for Sherry Week so you can try something like it yourself

It was the winning entry in the UK final of the Copa Jerez which is an international sherry pairing competition for chefs and sommeliers and was won by Gail Ge’er Li and Jaichen Lu of Dinings SW3 restaurant.

What was interesting about the dish was how homely it was - rich, warming and perfect for this time of year. Both the tongue and the radish had been braised in an umami-rich stock to which amontillado sherry had been added - the claypot rice had been cooked in the same stock. There were also some pickled girolles in the dish and some shredded ginger and shiso leaf which added a refreshing lift.

The intensely nutty, dry sherry the winning pair chose was the ‘La Cigarrera’ Palomino oloroso from Bodegas La Cigarrera, a small family-owned bodega in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. You can buy it from terrawines.co.uk for £16.50

Both the other finalists partnered their main courses with dry oloroso - Restaurant Story with a dish of roast pigeon and a roasted artichoke purée and the team from Elchies Brasserie on the Macallan estate with a Speyside Wellington where the beef was cured in oloroso then smoked over Macallan sherry cask shavings.

Dry oloroso is a much underrated style IMO (you can see some more pairings here) but one well worth exploring with food.

I was a judge at the Copa Jerez final which took place this year at Trivet in London

Pistachio and date cookies with Cavendish Vin de Liqueur

An incredible pairing this week and one I’m afraid you’re unlikely to be able to replicate - so far as the wine element is concerned anyway. But there are alternatives which I’ll suggest.

My cookbook club finally got together in person after over a year and celebrated with a feast from one of my favourite cookbooks Sami Tamimi and Tara Wigley’s Falastin, a marvellous book of Palestinian food (Sami himself is Palestinian).

We all brought a dish (I made the sumac onion and herb oil buns which you can see on my food_writer instagram feed) but my friend, food writer Xanthe Clay, made these ma’amoul bars which are light, crumbly cookies stuffed with either pistachio or date paste. They’re delicately spiced, fragrant but not overly sweet and Xanthe served them with strawberry ice cream (bouza) made with mastic and fresh strawberries.

Cue a dessert wine - maybe a muscat - but what we in fact had was a 1956 vintage of Cavendish, a South African 'vin de liqueur' which our host Luke more than generously shared with us. It’s a tawny port-style wine, bottled after 25 years in barrel and still vibrant after 65 years but without that extended oak-aged character that can make older ports taste more about the wood than the fruit. In some ways it was more like a sherry and just unbelievably delicious.

Anyway I reckon these cookies would also make a good accompaniment for other aged fortified wines like tawny ports, VORS sherries, old madeiras or mature Australian stickies for which it’s hard to find a good dessert pairing but with which you might just want a nibble of something sweet.

An amazing experience.

Chocolate truffles and PX

You can tell how much I love sherry from the fact that this is the second week running a food pairing involving sherry has been my match of the week.

Actually it could even have been the second consecutive week for palo cortado (this time with an aged Manchego) but I thought that might be overdoing it!

So it’s unctuous chocolate truffles with sweet raisiny Pedro Ximenez aka PX - in this case Gonzalez Byass Nectar.

The pairing was one of six in a sherry event for which I collaborated with my local tapas bar, Bar 44 which, like their Cardiff bars, is closed for the time being. Owen Morgan, who presented the tasting with me, co-owns the bars with his brother Tom and sister Natalie and is a complete sherry fanatic, known on Twitter and Instagram as @sherrymonster44.

The truffles, which contained indecent amounts of chocolate and cream along with a dusting of grilled hazelnuts, were also insanely good. So rich you (or at least, I) couldn’t manage more than a couple with a couple of accompanying sips which suits PX just perfectly.

For other PX pairings see here or to buy a copy of my sherry ebook click here.