Domaine La Haute Févrie Clos de la Févrie Muscadet Sèvre et Maine Sur Lie, France 2015 (£11.49, Virgin Wines) There are a lot of tricky ingredients from a wine-matching perspective in Rosie Sykes’s comforting Sunday supper recipes. The high acid of vinegar, for one, can overwhelm softer styles of wine, masking the flavours and leaving your mouth with little but alcohol to be getting on with. With those soused mackerels and pickles, then, the only choice is to match tartness with tartness, which means a white wine with plenty of acidity – a style that also happens to be the best to cut through the oily flesh of mackerel (with or without vinegar). Chablis, the Basque wine Txacoli, or a limey dry Australian riesling are candidates, as is Domaine la Haute Févrie’s superior, super-racy, mineral muscadet.
Tandem Syrah du Maroc, Morocco 2013 (from £14.95, Yapp Brothers; Borough Wines) With fiery spices – whether Szechuan pepper, ginger or, in the case of Rosie’s chermoula paste, the combination of paprika, garlic and chilli – it’s not acid but sugar, or at least an impression of sweetness, that I often find myself turning to. The sugar in an off-dry white such as the stone-fruit-filled Australian Alsace-alike Tesco Finest McLaren Vale/Adelaide Hills SR 2016 (£8) would act as a kind of cushion for the heat in Rosie’s marinade. Another option, particularly if you go a little easier on the chilli, is a rich and spicy warm-climate red with enough flesh and presence to out-muscle the spice. Given the origins of chermoula, the sweetly spiced, ripe plum and fig of top Rhône winemaker Alain Graillot’s Moroccan syrah would make an apt and satisfying combination.
Regina Viarum Mencía, Ribeira Sacra, Spain 2016 (£11.50, The Wine Society) Rosie’s satsuma salad has a little bit of sweetness from the honey, and plenty of acidity in the citrus and vinegar, but it’s really all about the invigorating interplay of the tanginess and bitterness in the fresh fruit and vegetables. A white style that shares those qualities is Austrian grüner veltliner, which often has a kind of herbal-greenness and a pleasingly bitter snap in the finish that is reminiscent of fennel or endive. Marks & Spencer has a lively example in Rabl Grüner Veltliner, Kamptal Austria 2015 (£9.50). The brightness of pomegranate and satsuma dish would also work with a high-acid red that goes easy on the tannins and big on pure red fruit. Regina Viarum Galician Mencía is particularly supple and juicy.
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