Pairings | Shepherd's pie

The best wine pairings for hachis parmentier

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on November 12 2014 at 08:35

Que boire avec hachis parmentier? Or ‘what wine should I drink with hachis parmentier?’ - the French answer to shepherd’s and cottage pie.

I’ve been down in the Languedoc this week and decided to have a crack at one of France’s favourite comfort foods, not least because we’d rashly bought a huge tray of potatoes from a local grower who turned up at the door. The distinguishing feature of hachis parmentier, which makes it irresistible to potato lovers like me, is that it has two layers of mashed potato, one on the bottom as well as one on the top.

The middle would have traditionally been filled with leftover pot-au-feu or chopped roast meat moistened with stock (I used freshly minced beef) so it has less of a gravy-ish taste than a shepherd’s or cottage pie but is still quite meaty and savoury. There’s usually quite a lot of garlic - there was in mine - and parsley.

The French of course would drink French wine - what else? - but any robust, rustic dry red would do. We drank a rather indulgent natural wine called El Niño from Casot de Mailloles in the Roussillon (the 2011 vintage) which was absolutely delicious but I’d be happy to drink a hearty red from almost anywhere in south or south-west France or an inexpensive Bordeaux come to that. You couldn’t go wrong with a Côtes du Rhône Villages, Côtes du Roussillon or Costières de Nîmes, for example.

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