Pinot Noir tasting at Cambridge Food and Wine Society

Sensitive, hedonistic and elusive - the Pinot
Noir grape growing in Burgundy

A Pinot Noir tasting I went to at the weekend really appealed to the bargain hunter in me. And it was not because the wines were cheap - far from it, you wouldn’t get much change from a tenner for even the "basic" Pinot Noirs we tried, and prices quickly rose into the mid-teens (and beyond for an excellent Burgundy !).

Pinot Noir is never actually cheap - or if it is, like the £5 supermarket own-label Burgundy a colleague turned up with a while ago, it is hardly worth even using in the cooking. A low-yielding, thin-skinned grape, prone to mutation and notoriously difficult to grow, it demands cool climate conditions where it becomes susceptible to late frosts and disease. Its spiritual home is Burgundy, but increasingly it is being grown in areas that are cool due to latitude (central Otago, Oregon), maritime influences (parts of California and Marlborough) or altitude (Chile and Argentina, where the vineyards are up to 1,500m above sea level).

However, when it does grow well, it produces a wine like no other with flavours of red berry fruit, hedonistically decadent aromas of truffles, game and farmyard and a gloriously smooth texture. Elusive, moody and yet capable of a unique greatness, Pinot Noir is said to be the wine of poets, visionaries and romantics - albeit ones with deep pockets.

I have had more disappointing Pinot Noirs than great ones and none has been cheap (except for the £5 one I mentioned above), so the prospect of trying eight Pinots, for less than the price of a single mid-range bottle, selected by someone who knows their stuff, struck me as too much of a bargain to be missed.

For, even though good Pinot Noir is never cheap, great Pinot Noir can be a relative bargain – depending on how many different wines you have to try before you hit on something that blows your socks off.

The wines we tried are listed below – the “value wine” of the evening was the Tabali Reserva from Chile, whilst the overall favourite was the red Burgundy, priced more for special occasions that everyday quaffing.

1) Alamos, Seleccion 2008, Mendoza, Argentina (£8.39, Noel Young)
2) Tabali, Reserva Especial, 2007, Limari Valley, Chile (£8.99, Bacchanalia)
3) Au Bon Climat, Santa Maria Valley, 2006, California, USA (£17.65 Noel Young)
4) Peregrine, 2006, Central Otago, New Zealand (£16.99 Bacchanalia)
5) Craggy Range, Te Muna Road, 2006, Martinborough, New Zealand (£17.99 Waitrose)
6) Stonier, Mornington Peninsula, 2006, Victoria, Australia (£13.95)
7) Bergstrom, Willamette Valley, 2006, Oregon, USA (£19.99)
8) Virgile Linier, Vielles Vignes, Chambolle-Musigny, 2003 Burgundy, France (£30.95, Noel Young)

Ukrainian Food and Wine Evening

I imagine it's fairly safe to say that Ukrainian food and wine is not well-known in this country, so I thought it would be at least unusual (and hopefully interesting) to present an evening of Ukrainian food and wine to the Cambridge Food & Wine Society last month.

Given the amount of cooking involved (the emphasis of the evening was more on the food than the wine), we had to limit our numbers, but a sudden flurry of last-minute interest led to us deciding to squeeze in a few extra people and even then we had to turn some people away.

After a few rounds of revisions, we ended up with around 10 food courses plus two types of sparkling wine, horilka (vodka) and brandy.

I started off by asking how many people, if any, had been to Ukraine - it turned out one couple had been on holiday and one member had travelled there on business a couple of times. That meant almost 90% of the audience had never been to Ukraine.

Next question was to see if anyone recognised any of the names of food items (all in Ukrainian) - most people got "borshch" (beetroot-based soup), "shokolad" was a fairly easy guess and one person got "ikra" (caviar, served on white bread with butter).

There were two main reasons that I put down only the Ukrainian-language versions of the food - firstly, in many cases, there is no English equivalent and secondly, the descriptions did not really do justice to the food. Stuffed cabbage rolls may not sound appetising, but the reality is that they are delicious little parcels of mince and rice, wrapped in a cabbage leaf and gently simmered in a tomato sauce until tender and then served with sour cream.

Other popular items included the otbivny (similar to a schnitzel, but made from pork and without breadcrumbs) and, particularly, varenyky (little pasta parcels like ravioli, but filled with sour cherries and served with yet more sour cream).

As for the drinks, the sparkling wines were generally deemed to be "workmanlike", but the vodka was a hit and the brandy received the most praise. Smooth with aromas of dried fruits and vanilla and a rounded and full-bodied feel in the mouth, there were plenty of requests for top-ups for this one.

I think part of the reason for the lack of success for the sparkling wines lies in the old Soviet attitude to agriculture in general - there is no concept of terroir in Ukraine, no idea that the key to producing great wine lies in the growing conditions and location of the vines. Instead, people tend to talk about which "factory" produces the best sparkling wine, as if wine-making is just another industrial process.

Another interesting footnote which turned up during my research is that Russia and Ukraine claim to have permission from France to label their sparkling wines "Champagne"; apparently, when sparkling wines were introduced into the then Russian empire, the rights to the use of the word “Champagne” was granted in perpetuity to the Russian Imperial Government by the French and that this cannot be rescinded.

Matching cheese and wine - Presenting to the Cambridge 800 Committee at Anstey Hall, Trumpington

Red wine with cheese ? Er, no thanks actually. As more people (including some esteemed wine writers) are finding out, cheese generally matches better with white wine. The main reason for this is that salt and tannin do not match. Now, most cheeses are fairly salty and most red wines have a fair amount of tannin, so the only surprise is how the whole red-wine-with-cheese myth came about in the first place.

Also, as cheese tends to have a fairly high fat content, the higher levels of acidity in a white wine, such as a Riesling or a Sauvignon Blanc, tend to cut through the fattiness of the cheese nicely.

That was the outline of a talk I gave to about 70 people at Anstey Hall in Trumpington, whose owner, John de Bruyne, had kindly made a room available for us. Normally, I give talks at the Cambridge Food & Wine Society, but someone who had been to one of my earlier talks on food and wine matching asked me if I could present this one for them.

My audience was members of the Cambridge 800 Committee, which raises money for the Cambridge & County Folk Museum (pictured), so it was all in a good cause. I was also joined by one of the Waitrose team from Trumpington who had researched the cheeses and got a colleague from the wine department to suggest the matches.

In the end, we sampled just one red wine that evening - a Rioja, paired with some manchego. Now I like both Rioja and manchego very much but, for me, the two were not necessarily enhanced by being consumed together, which rather supports my original position. The highlight of the evening was definitely an Austrian dessert wine with Roquefort. Both were delicious on their own, but together they really worked; creamy, yet pungent Roquefort matched with the unctuous, honeyed Beerenauslese.

The evening was really well received, but it was not my only speaking engagement that week - a few days later, I was due to give a talk on Ukrainian food ...