An Evening of Swine and Wine

Posted by winesleuth in Food and Wine, New Zealand wine, Portugal | 2 comments

Swine and Wine. Sounds like my idea of a very good night indeed and my friends over at DVine Wine teamed up with Lardy Da (cute) to put on a supper club-y type dinner the other night somewhere under an arch near London Bridge. A big sparse room, with concrete floors, art pieces scattered around the walls and a rockabilly bass player in the corner greeted me as I entered and I thought, yeah, this should be a good night. What made me sure it was going to be a good night was the big paper bag full of pork crackling on the table I noticed when I sat down. Brilliant idea in lieu of bread!

DVine Wine, who I’ve written about before, are all about sourcing sustainable wines, not necessarily natural wines, more like biodynamic or organic which, if they happen to be natural, well that’s just a good wine nonetheless.  Lardy Da is all about the swine and using the bits and pieces that normally get thrown out (like trotters and tails for the jelly) for their ethically sourced pork pies.

The idea of pork pies and wine, well, why not? The first wine we had was a sylvaner, a lesser known grape from the great producer Domaine Ostertag. This wine was a winner round the table, a 2007 it was lusher then expected with ripe granny smith apples and a pleasing coconut flake nose, finishing off with dry, zippy lime notes. Served with a trad pork pie, it cut through the fat like a scythe.

A New Zealand sauvignon blanc but not as we know it. The 2010 Urlar s.blanc was a throwback to the way NZ SB used to be – gooseberry, passionfruit and lime with none of that cat’s pee on the nose. I do hope that is falling out of favour. This was a fuller s.b. then I’m used to but delicious indeed. It was served with a pig’s head terrine which I didn’t really think had much to it. I preferred the pork pies that were being served up and went back to the trad pork pie for this wine.

Moving onto the reds, the Roc des Anges Segna Cor 2009 was an absolute delight, black cherry depths with a hint of pepper on the nose, the palate a riot of sweet red fruits, cinnamon, which really jumped out at me, and mocha coupled with soft tannins made this wine go down way too easy. Paired with a pork pie with fig and date jelly, very nice indeed.

The heavy hitter of the evening in both terms of wine and pies were the last two – a Douro red and pork pie with port jelly and pecans. Big bold sweet flavours going on with the food as port jelly might not be so easy to match but the Quinta de la Rosa 2008 DOC Douro red stood it’s ground. A big and bold wine, aromatically inclined to mulberries, leather and spicy with a hearty herbaceous note on the nose, following on the palate with more of the same and a ripe juiciness with tannins that balanced out the wine against the fruit. A wine that kept on giving long after I gulped it down.

I like the idea of swine and wine and speaking to Greg of Dvine afterwards, he told me they may be doing more in the new year. I certainly hope they do. Here’s to more (s)wine in 2011!