Apropos of my piece on sauvignon blanc and food pairings, where I debated the merits of making SB work so hard, I participated in a menu paired solely to bubblies last Wednesday night. Since I had also helped with the wine and food matches, I was now partly responsible for the results. The wines were the bubblies of Graham Beck with the food from the Showroom kitchen. And though the evening was again a success, it should be seen in the “experimental” category as regards its certain propriety.
With beluga caviar, no doubt. With perlemoen “fishcakes” and foie gras where the perlemoen was a little salty the wine was not shown in the best light, though, being a blanc de blanc that had spent 15 years on the lees, it was an absolute beauty. Onto a main that set two versions of the 1999 off against a roast duck breast with two sauces: a rustic winter sauce with dozens of pulses and a summery citric butter. Though the wine was the same, one bottle was recently degorged, the other had spent a few months on the cork, and was ample illustration of the importance of letting your bubbly lie for a time to develop complexity. The pairing was fine here, no awkwardness, though no fireworks either, and the wine supplicatory.
Dessert, one of bubbly’s traditional domains, was an average match-up, as it so often is in my books. With the plan to introduce lots of tart apple flavours into the food to light up the fruits, I am not convinced we succeeded.
Yet, again, no one seemed to care that much and enjoyed the food and the wine. I have had the opinion that food and wine pairing is an erratic exercise for some time, and made all the more so because people generally eat and drink in sequence, not simultaneously.
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