DRINKS
There’s an easy match with things from the ocean, but there’s also a sea of options outside the tried and the true, writes MAX ALLEN.
Max Allen matches drinks with seafood.
White wine with fish. It’s one of the first rules all hungry grape geeks learn when they start to think about matching wine and food. And on the whole, it’s a very reliable rule: nobody would disagree that a nice glass of crisp, cold Chablis is going to taste better with a platter of oysters than a full-bodied, oaky shiraz.
But that doesn’t mean you should only reach for a chardonnay or savvy blanc when fish is on the menu. I have found, over decades of careful research (yes, mostly in the form of eating and drinking to joyous excess in exotic locations around the world) that there are plenty of other, less-obvious liquid matches that work just as well, if not better.
Take that platter of plump oysters. Sure, a good Chablis – or, even better, a lesser-known French dry white such as Muscadet or Picpoul – is a deservedly classic match. But consider instead pairing oysters with a late-disgorged sparkling wine.
After performing the secondary, fizz-forming fermentation in the bottle, yeast cells settle as sediment, called lees, and eventually break down over time, releasing a number of compounds into the liquid that make it more complex, more creamy, more delicious – including amino acids, which give the wine a savoury, umami taste that’s perfect with oysters. And the longer the wine remains in contact with the lees before disgorging, the more savoury and oyster-friendly it is.
Yeast also plays a big role in the production and flavour profile of bone-dry, pale-coloured Spanish sherry styles such as fino and manzanilla. As these sherries mature over many years in not-quite-full barrels, a film of special creamy yeast called flor grows on the surface of the liquid, contributing a nutty, yeasty, slightly saline flavour. And it’s this briny, tangy character that makes a cold glass of fino or manzanilla such a great accompaniment to salty, grilled prawns in a seaside tapas bar.
If you’ve travelled around the western Mediterranean you’ll have noticed that when local seafood recipes include richer-tasting ingredients such as garlic and tomato, saffron and broth – I’m looking at you, bouillabaisse – then the local drinkers tend to pour pink wine, not white, in their glasses. Which makes sense: you need the extra weight of flavour and slightly higher alcohol and even the subtle grippiness of tannin in, say, a good pale, dry
Provençal rosé to stand up to the bigger flavours in the food.
Up in the opposite corner of France, in Normandy and Brittany, one of the most popular seafood dishes is mussels cooked in a creamy, boozy sauce. But unlike the white wine used to make moules marinière elsewhere in France, in the north-west the locals use cider, called cidre here, and they eat the mussels with a glass of the same cider they splashed in the pan.
It’s a heavenly combo: the sweet/tart/bitter character of traditional Norman and Breton cider apples matches the sweetness of the mussels and cuts through the fattiness of the sauce. The same gastronomic principle lies behind the classic Basque