Last night we had the opportunity to host a Pacific Rim styled food and wine dinner at Danny's in St Aubin. Danny has recently reopened his restaurant after a six week break and there is now a stunning new al-fresco area (somehow I think this will be extremely busy once the weather warms up!!) and brand new kitchens for Danny to continue his bold experimentation of flavour combinations. Danny put together quite a challenging menu and asked us to match the wines. Thankfully he was very obliging when we asked if we could come and taste the food a couple of weeks beforehand so that we could make sure that the wines matched perfectly, always a great perk of this job!! Unfortunately I was unable to attend but Liz, Neil and Kasia took down a good selection of different wines and were very pleased with their eventual choices. Thankfully, I was able to attend last night but this time Neil couldn't make it as he is currently recovering from a chest infection so stayed home. There are so many people with chest infections at the moment....damn weather!
So to kick start the evening we chose to showcase the
G. H. Mumm, Mumm de Cramant n.v. Champagne @ £34.95 per bottle (available in-store only) along with Danny's taster dish of Steamed pork 'n' peanut relish bun. The Mumm de Cramant is a beautifully elegant Champagne sourced from a single vineyard within the famous village of Cramant in the Cotes de Blancs. It is made from 100% Chardonnay and has lovely fresh lime, lemon and grapefruit flavours on its incredibly complex but elegant palate. The bubbles are so delicate and the acidity is spot on. For the techy people reading this, the ‘melt-in-the-mouth’ mousse is created by bottling under lower pressure to produce very small, fine bubbles (4.5 Atmospheres as opposed to the rest of the Mumm range which is 6). This is now officially my new favourite Champagne. It was absolutely delicious with the pork relish, a match I was not expecting.
Next up was the starter of Scallop nan-jim (salty/sweet/spicy dressing with coriander, chilli and lime). Beautifully presented and smelling utterly divine we dived in with two different white wines matches, the
Mount Difficulty Pinot Gris 'Roaring Meg' 2008 and the
One Chain Vineyards Colombard-Sauvignon-Riesling 'The Opportunist' 2008. Two very different wines but they both worked really well with the dish. In fact my favourite, and many agreed, was the wine from One Chain Vineyards. We were delighted to showcase this extremely food versatile wine and at £4.95 in the shop, this is fabulous value. The dish was really beautiful with an amazing liquour that just screamed 'Drink me'! and with no spoon to do so was quickly (and discreetly) tipped and drunk! Yum Yum...
Next was the main course of Shredded lamb Tabouli ('dry' lamb with rosemary and garlic served on Tabouli couscous salad with honey and mustard dressing and yogurt) served with
Trentham Estate Heathcote Shiraz 2006, one of my favourite wines. We are just moving on to the 2006 vintage from the awesome, multi award winning 2005 but this vintage is also going to be an award winner. In fact, Trentham announced only yesterday that they have just picked up a gold medal for this wine at the Sydney Wine Show.
This wine is rich in berry and spice flavours and has a gorgeous deep colour. Ripe and earthy, rich and balanced showing ripe fruit aromas of pepper, plum and chocolate. Lovely length too and I love it! The dish was an explosion of flavours encompassing many unusual flavour combinations and the wine married perfectly, it was certainly a talking point. As you will see from the next photo, I caught a customer taking a picture of the wine with his iPhone so that he could come down to buy some. Always good to see!
Last up was dessert of Sticky black rice and coconut with sesame banana. We matched this with
Château Filhot Sauternes 2005. This Sauternes is stylish, delicate in sweetness and packed with pineapple aromas and flavours which made it a great match for this dish. Hot squishy banana with textural black rice....yummy. All I needed was some hot weather and a beach! Actually, this dish served on Danny's terrace would be fab in the summer!
We also served the
Bundaberg Distillers No.3 Rum from Australia as an after-dinner drink. All I can say is that it didn't last very long!
Thank you Danny and thank you to everyone who came. We hope you enjoyed the evening. Thanks also to Liz (our lovely GM) for her informative food and wine matching talks between courses. A very enjoyable evening.
Jane
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