Drink - Victoria Moore drinks herself down under the table
Moaning about Australian wine is quite a sport among wine writers. The big brands are particularly derided. But while most of us are perfectly comfortable with that state of affairs, it doesn't really seem acceptable for the Australians to return the compliment. Penfolds - which, some critics complain, makes "industrial" wines - brought Chris Matuhina, the executive chef of the company's Magill Estate Restaurant, over from Adelaide a few weeks ago to cook at the Lanesborough Hotel.
I went to a food-and-wine matching session there. It wasn't long before another distinguished Antipodean chef, John Torode, asked Matuhina how he was finding the ingredients over here.
"Someone asked me that last night," he said, "and you try to be polite and courteous . . ." He said that he couldn't get the fish he wanted, nor the mushrooms; and that while tuna steaks in Australia are thick and meaty, here they are thin and tinny . . . the list went on. The truth is that Australian food is very different to anything we eat here - fleshier and bigger, with ringingly clean, exaggerated flavours. Much of it demands the sort of fruity uplift that you get with Australian wines and, by the same token, those wines show much better when drunk with big-tasting food.
It's the kind of food that I rarely cook - my battered Elizabeth David and Robert Carrier giving way only to Italian dishes from all over the place, Sam and Sam Clark's Moro: the cookbook and Brian Glover recipes in Homes & Gardens magazine, to which I am utterly addicted. But if you do occasionally have a dish of noodles, or perhaps a fillet steak rubbed with Asian spices and served with stir-fried greens, then don't dismiss Australian wine.
At the Lanesborough, we ate braised venison, bacon and mushroom pie with 1991 St Henri and 1999 Koonunga Hill Shiraz Cabernet Sauvignon. The pie was delicious, particularly with the St Henri, which was firm and full enough (indeed, it was delicious) to stand up to the strong meat and fatty pastry, but any number of Old World wines would have done the job just as well. The spiced tuna fillet with bok choy, coriander and shiitake mushrooms was another matter. Torode observed that he thought anyone who tried to match shiitake mushrooms with wine was a brave man (Chris had to point out that he was unable to buy the mushrooms he'd wanted). I think I also heard him note that the 1994 Penfolds Barrel Fermented Semillon didn't quite work with it because it was quite drying on the palate, in the same way that tuna is. But anyway, that wasn't my kind of wine. I did really enjoy the 1999 Old Vine Barossa Valley Semillon, which held up to the spices in the food and brought out the freshness of the greens. Its peachy undertones were carried with a nice vitality. With this food, it tasted very springy - but don't, for goodness sake, try to drink it with salade nicoise.
We had now reached the pudding course - a dried-fruit compote with poached pear and praline, and amaretto parfait cone (ice cream to you and me). Personally, I think ice cream is for licking in parks. Still, if you must, the discovery here was that chilled tawny port (we were drinking Magill Tawny) cut across the creaminess to clear the palate between schlurps. The 1998 Penfolds Botrytis Semillon was delicious with the compote - like adding another rich, luscious fruit into the mix. It was disastrous with the ice cream - far too cloying. But anyway, I figure that no one at home will try to rustle up amaretto parfait cone of a Wednesday night.
Usually I am too shy, and blush too much, to join in group discussions, but by this stage I had drunk quite enough wine to share my thoughts with the rest of the table, and people were polite enough to nod. I was so elated at having spoken that when the next wine was poured I swirled it very enthusiastically in the glass and sloshed it all down my white T-shirt. It was red, the same colour as my cheeks by the time I'd finished trying to mop myself up.
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