Wine: Tom Doorley’s food and wine delight

Afew years back I had lunch with the late Anthony Bourdain and we had a ball. He signed my copy of his Les Halles cookbook (with a sketch of a knife dripping with blood and the words ‘cook free or die’. He disparaged Gordon Ramsay as a ‘lightweight’, and reflected on the correlation between extreme nationalism and great food, citing Vietnam and the Basque Country in particular.

‘What about republican bits of Ireland,’ he asked? I scratched my head and admitted I had once had fish and chips in Crossmaglen and they had been, well, grand; in the Irish sense of the word.

Whatever about nationalism, I think intense regional pride often goes hand in hand with great eating. I genuinely believe the food is more interesting where wine is made. I’ve been thinking of two areas that make very different wines and have very different food — and I yearn for a proper taste of both. They are the Loire Valley and Piemonte in north-west Italy, one famous for Sancerre, the other for Barolo, one for crottins of fresh goat’s cheese, the other for truffles and all things truffled.

Of course, there’s a great deal more to both and it’s wise to seek beyond the local clichés — however, I’ll stick with the truffles as Piemonte’s greatest contribution to the sum of human happiness. When I think of saupiquet Nivernais, that weirdly wonderful combination of chopped ham, juniper, cream, wine and more, I think of how a Sancerre rosé is the perfect partner, while demonstrating this is as different from the Provençale pinks as you can get within France.

And I think of the Loire’s local version of eggs poached, or served with, a red wine sauce, the oeufs en meurette that you also find throughout Burgundy but hereabouts always associated with Chinon and, therefore, Cabernet Franc.

There’s a leafy quality to many Loire reds, a kind of blackcurrant foliage effect, familiar to anyone who has picked currants in an Irish summer. Some people call this herbaceous but strictly that refers to how certain perennial plants grow, and it has nothing to do with herbiness, but whatever, it’s food friendly.

I have some lovely Loires for you today, and a pair of Piemontese wines, one made from the Nascetta di Novello grape that was saved from extinction by the winemaker. The other is a Barbera d’Asti that beats many a Barbera d’Alba hands down.