English Food and Wine Pairing

As English Wine Week starts today (28 May 2016) we thought we should focus on a traditional English Food and Wine Pairing for our blog. So how much more British can you get than Roast Beef with all the trimmings?

I usually slow roast my joint of beef in gravy for a couple of hours and serve it with roast potatoes, roast parsnips, carrots, green beans, Yorkshire puddings, and probably a few ‘pigs in blankets’ too (that’s sausages wrapped in bacon for readers from other countries). That would all be served with rich gravy and a little horseradish sauce (I love horseradish with my beef, although I’m not keen when it burns the inside of nose, but I can live with that). It’s my favourite roast dinner and luckily my family seem to agree so empty plates and full bellies all round!

Any fabulous roast dinner deserves a fabulous wine pairing to accompany it. Erica gives her recommendation on what English Wines to serve.

English Food and Wine Pairing – Fabulous English Wine

So this dish it is full of flavour, not just the fact that the meat is beef, it has gravy, bacon, and horseradish for goodness sake! So we need a pungent English Fizz and I know just the one, Hambledon’s Meonhill Sparkling Chardonnay. The wines are primarily from 2009 with some 2008, so this wine really shows the nutty, honeyed punch found on a more mature fizz; so with all those savoury notes the beef and gravy will rejoice and the honey will calm the fiery horseradish.

I’ll get the wine, Julie what time is lunch?

If you’d like to know about what events are going on in at Vineyards in our area for English Wine Week, then please have a read of our English Wine Week blog kindly written by our guest blogger Ian Hardwick of Wine Cellar Door, the independent guide to visitor-friendly vineyards.

Julie Strutt DipM and Erica Dent DipWSET