Wines with a Tasting Menu

A couple of weeks ago for my husband’s birthday, we treated ourselves to a posh night out and opted for the tasting menu. This past weekend I was talking with friends who had also recently done the same thing but with a different purpose behind choosing the tasting menu.

Tasting menu- reason for choice

Our reason for opting for the tasting menu was to explore the chef’s talent as much as possible, the restaurant is JSW in Petersfield, Hampshire the owner is Michelin star chef Jake Saul Watkins. They present various tasting menu options, five-course, seven-course, and these also offer the opportunity to explore food and wine pairing whereby they have selected certain wines to go with each dish.

Tasting menu – the food

For us our reason for choosing the tasting menu is because the food is invariably a theatre of taste and flavour which we love to experience. It included artichoke soup with smoked hazelnuts, sea bass with Ceps, cured salmon with miso vinaigrette and broccoli, continuing onto fabulously prepared and presented duck and lamb dishes, plus two desserts!

For our friends it was a special occasion but not something they would usually do, so the choice of dishes on the a la carte menu was quite overwhelming. Therefore, choosing the tasting menu allowed them to try dishes they would not usually pick but only have a small portions, so less risk. In fact one of them told me that she was not at all interested in food and that if she could take a pill for each meal instead it would suit her fine – a challenge for any chef.

Tasting menu – the wine

I would usually opt to try the wines selected to go with each dish, but sometimes I also like to challenge myself to find a wine that both my husband and I like (we have fairly different tastes – he is sensitive where I am more tolerant), but also one that I feel can stand up to the variety of dishes but also changing with the food.

I am proud to report that not only did I manage this but I only studied the extensive wine list for around 10 to 15 minutes which for me, as my husband will testify, is pretty rapid. I managed to speed things up by going for a strong flavoured, high acid white wine followed by a structured red, which I believed would be complementary to our variation in dishes.

Our friends who went to The Crown at Whitebrook, in Wales, went with the wine-by-the-glass paired with the dishes tasting menu. On the whole he loves big reds, Chateauneuf-du-Pape would be his first choice, and she prefers Sauvignon Blanc and does not drink red.

Tasting menu – the outcome

So for us, which wines worked with our wonderful array of flavours? The first was a gorgeous (and I am not exaggerating) Riesling from South Africa, a 2004 from Jordan Winery. It was so fruity and honeyed the flavour stood up remarkably well to our dishes and each one either enhanced the citrus or honey character stunningly. We switched to a Chateau Lagrange, St Julien, Bordeaux 2006, available from Fareham Wine Cellar but not the 2006, which was superb with our lamb and also the duck, but we also found the Riesling with the duck to be pretty fabulous too. My husband is not a sweet wine fan but could see the benefits of our puddings with a delicious Nederburg Noble Late Harvest Chenin / Muscat, again from South Africa, but fortunately he left most of it for me.

So what about our friends, who tried food they would definitely not usually eat, drank wines that would avoid whenever possible? The conclusion is easily summed up in three words, they loved everything!

Tasting Menu by Erica Dent AIWS, Enjoy Discovering Wine

Updated 2019: Sadly Restaurant JSW is now closed.