Match of the week

Chargrilled baby lamb, salad and Rueda

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on July 22 2019 at 10:39

If you think of lamb you almost certainly think of red wine but in a white wine producing region like Rueda white is the normal go to.

Of course at this time of year it’s not likely to be slowly cooked or richly sauced but cooked on an open grill as it was in a fantastic family restaurant called Mesón de Pedro in the village of Matapozuelos just south of Valladolid.

One of the reasons the combination with white wine - in this case verdejo - works is that they use extremely tender milk-fed lamb (normal for this part of the world, sorry), salt it generously and serve it pink, bordering on rare.

The other is that the standard accompaniment is a crunchy salad of lettuce, tomato and sweet white onion which picks up on the fresh acidity of the wine.

Also there’s more than one type of Rueda not just the fresh, citrussy, sauvignon blanc-like styles you may be used to. The ones that are made from the indigenous verdejo, aged on their lees and which have a year or two’s bottle age - i.e. the more premium wines - work best.

Here are some other wine pairings for lamb you might enjoy

I travelled to the region as a guest of the Rueda DO.

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