Match of the week

Fonduta with white truffles and Barbera d’Alba

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on December 2 2013 at 07:38

There’s only one pairing I could focus on this week given that I was in Piemonte and that is white truffles. What was the best match? Incredibly hard to say!

There were so many amazing ones - tajarin, the fine, intensely eggy pasta, carne cruda (the Piedmontese version of steak tartare) and a ‘timballo’ of autumn vegetables and truffles among them - but the one I think I’ve got to go for is the fonduta, a wonderful rich eggy fondue lavishly scattered with truffle shavings we had at Trattoria della Posta at Monforte d’Alba which I reviewed here.

I remember I picked out almost exactly the same dish six years ago when I last visited Piedmont though then we had it with one of the local white wines, a Roero Arneis - maybe because the dish also included cardoons.

It is, however, more usual for the Piedmontese to serve a young red wine with a white truffle dish, most commonly a Barbera or a Dolcetto rather than the Barolo I suggested back then. (Barolo would work equally well though they tend to save it for the main course). This time we drank a 2009 Barbera d’Alba Codamonte from Giuseppe Mascarello.

You could, of course, drink white wine with truffle dishes especially with carne cruda - with which we had a rich Gaja Chardonnay. And champagne though that’s obviously not traditional in the region.

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