Imagine cooking a beautiful, seasonal meal and then elevating the taste experience even further with a glass of wine that’s delicious, features the lowest air miles possible and is bang on trend. That’s what you get when you match English wines with Mindful Chef recipes.
English Wine Week is the perfect time to get on board with our heavenly homegrown wines, if you haven’t done so already. And if you’re a signed-up fan of English wine (and you really should be), then it’s time to celebrate, because as you already know, this country’s wines have never looked or tasted so good.
The Mindful Chef pairing menu for English Wine Week
With that in mind, I’ve pulled together a few epic bottles that will work beautifully with some of this week’s recipes, so read on, order in, and revel in the flavour-combination fireworks that you’re about to treat your palates to.
Langham Corallian Classic Cuvee NV (Dorset) with Samphire Baked Salmon with Herby Potato Salad, Rocket & Tomatoes
First up, a delicious – and multi-award-winning – sparkling wine from Dorset. Langham Estate’s Corallian Classic Cuvée is the kind of wine that could match a whole host of dishes thanks to its combination of richness and freshness. My ultimate match would be the Samphire Baked Salmon with Herby Potato Salad, because the freshness of the fizz heightens the ‘green’ herb flavours and cuts through the natural oiliness of the salmon. That said, it would also be a winning match with dishes featuring plenty of aromatic spices, like yellow Thai chicken curry.
Nyetimber English Summer Rosé (West Sussex) with Roast Vegetable Gnocchi with Sundried Tomato & Walnut Pesto
Spoiler alert: sparkling rosé is epic with food. Nyetimber is one of the pioneering English wine producers that put the UK on the world-class wine map, and I’ve always loved their beautiful rosé, which is packed with flavours of hibiscus and pomegranate. That inherent fruitiness, plus the creamy base, gives it great food-matching creds with juicy ripe tomatoes, so my go-to pairing with the Mindful Chef menu would be the Roast Vegetable Gnocchi with Sundried Tomato & Walnut Pesto, especially given Nyetimber’s wines are also vegan-friendly.
Lyme Bay Shoreline (Devon) with Niçoise-style Anchovy Salad with Roast Potatoes, Green Beans & Gooey Egg
Devon winery Lyme Bay is making loads of tasty still wines. Its flagship wine, Shoreline, is a zesty blend of lots of grapes (grown in the most sought-after county for wine grapes atm – Essex). I’d recommend drinking this with the Niçoise-style salad with anchovies, as the wine has a delicious salinity to match the fish, plus its bright and crisp personality matches the tang of olives and cuts through the richness of egg yolk.
Stopham Estate Pinot Gris 2023 (West Sussex) with Honeyed Chorizo & Sweetcorn Salad with Caramelised Onions
Stopham Estate in Sussex makes a fantastic version of Pinot Gris (fun fact: Pinot Gris is the same grape as Pinot Grigio, it’s just a juicier, ‘rounder’ version). The tropical vibe of this Pinot Gris makes it a fantastic choice with the Honeyed Chorizo & Sweetcorn Salad with Caramelised Onions. Even though this is a dry white, its generous juicy flavour nicely tempers hotter ingredients like some chorizos, and also matches up to ingredients that have a sweeter edge to them, like honey or ripe kernels of sweetcorn.
Blackbook Drums Space 2022 (London) with Pork Meatball Fusilli with Sundried Tomato Sauce & Rocket Pesto
As for red wines, even though the climate is getting warmer, England still makes reds on the lighter end of the global red wine spectrum. That’s a plus in my book, because lighter reds are generally more food-friendly. London’s urban winery Blackbook is making some stunning bottles of red, including the Drumspace Field Blend, which I’ve paired with the Pork Meatball Fusilli with Sun-dried Tomato Sauce. This plump red oozes dark plum flavours, so it ebbs and flows effortlessly with the dominant ingredients of the dish, from passata to pork and chicken stock to garlic.
When it comes to wine and food matching, consider the above just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to such a broad range of tasty still and sparkling wines now being made on our shores, the possibilities really are endless. And, given English wine and Mindful Chef both represent ingredient integrity and excellent flavour, they’re destined for a long future together, which means this year is the year to get English-wine-and-Mindful-Chef curious.
Jane Rakison