One of the most exciting parts of Fran Nolan’s job as Head Chef at Brancott Estate Heritage Centre is making sure every dish matches perfectly to one of the Brancott Estate signature wines. As Fran explains, food and wine matching can seem complicated but there are a few basic principles that make it easy to choose the right wine to complement your cooking.
“Each time we sit down to plan our seasonal menu at the Brancott Estate Heritage Centre, we are thinking of a number of elements. A lot of our visitors are tourists and we want to give them the chance to enjoy the best ingredients from Marlborough producers, like Ōra King Salmon. We then look at dishes that will showcase the flavours of these ingredients as well as the flavours of Brancott Estate wines.
Food and wine matching is an important part of our menu planning and we spend a lot of time with our winemakers making sure that the dishes bring out the best elements of both the wine and the food.
In the past, the rule was ‘white wine with fish, red wine with meat’. For the most part this works, and is based on the idea of balancing the ‘weight’ and flavours of the meal with the wine. There are always exceptions to any rule. One of my favourite matches is pork and Pinot Gris – the spicy pear flavours of the wine complement the pork flavours in the same way that apple sauce does. I’ve also cooked Groper and Salmon in a Pinot Noir sauce, and then served the dish with the same wine.
When we match dishes to wine, we are looking for complementary weight, and complementary or contrasting flavours. We also look at how the wine and food textures work together. Some, but not too much, contrast of textures can work well. For example, a creamy sauce matched with a ‘creamy’ chardonnay can end up being too similar, so the wine and meal flavours blend together. A creamy sauce with an ‘acidic’ Sauvignon Blanc can almost curdle the flavours. In this case, you would be best with a wine that is more balanced between creaminess and acidity, such as an unoaked Chardonnay, a Fumé Blanc (an oaked Sauvignon Blanc), or one of my favourites, Brancott Estate Marlborough Sauvignon Gris.
For the Sesame Crusted Ora King Salmon recipe, we were looking for a meal that would complement our Brancott Estate Sauvignon Blanc that has citrus, tropical fruit and ‘green’ aromas, in addition to the crisp acidity that is classic to Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc.
We knew that salmon would work well with Sauvignon Blanc, because the fresh flavours and light texture match well with the wine’s light freshness and the wine’s acidity contrasts nicely with the soft, buttery texture of the salmon. The contrast means that both the salmon and the wine really stand out, without one overpowering the other.
For the salad, we’ve included coriander which complements the ‘green’ notes in the wine, as well as apple and lemon that match the citrus aromas. And because we are matching it to a wine that is light and citrusy, we can include some contrasting ‘heat’ in our dish, through the wasabi, pickled ginger and radishes. This balance between a little heat in the dish and the ‘cool’ lemony flavours of the wine provides a lovely contrast.
For this dish, I was inspired by one of my favourite dishes, salmon sashimi. The salmon works so well with Japanese flavours like wasabi, ginger, sesame and tempura.”
Get Fran’s recipe for his Sesame Crusted Ora King Salmon here…
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