The surprising wines that pair best with red meat 

My husband frequently teases me for making my restaurant menu choices based on what appears on the right-hand side: the vegetables and other accompaniments rather than the main ingredient, which is more often than not meat.

At large catered meals, my heart rather sinks when I see the standard choice of a lump of meat, usually not-very-thrilling beef.

Knowing that several pages of this issue of the magazine were to be devoted to meat, however, I decided to research the question of which wines go best with it. I have to confess to a fairly cavalier attitude to food and wine matching in general. I find that in practice you can drink more or less anything with any food. If by any chance you encounter a clashing mismatch, a palate-rinse with water (which I try always to drink alongside wine) or a mouthful of something as bland as bread can neutralise it.

I suspect that with experience we build up a sort of computer in our brain that subconsciously guides us to make sensible choices. The only place I’d expect an absolutely perfect match is in an extremely fancy restaurant with a fine cellar and a limited menu, so the sommelier should be able to provide ideal options at various price levels.

But I have a colleague on Jancis Robinson.com, Tamlyn Currin, who specialises in detailed analysis of the interaction between her inventive dishes on the one hand and her cellar on the other. I was amazed by an article she wrote to coincide with Valentine’s Day this year in which she argued that the ideal match for roast beef, hot or cold, is pink fizz. On the face of it, this seemed extremely far-fetched. Every guide to food and wine matching insists that red wine is the only suitable accompaniment. Indeed, the guides usually go into quite a bit of detail suggesting that roast meat is an especially suitable accompaniment to young, tannic reds, making up a cocktail of complementary chewiness.

I put these theories to the test with the end of a tri-tip cut of Aberdeen Angus beef from a top-quality butcher, reared by Robert Spence on Roberthill Farm in Scotland.

First of all, I tried a range of reds that I happened to have open, most of them pretty young. Solms-Delta’s juicy Hiervandaan blend of Rhône grapes from South Africa was the youngest, a 2023. It’s a wine with a story. Neuropsychologist Mark Solms tried but was forced to abandon an attempt to transfer ownership of his family’s farm in Franschhoek to those who worked on it. The enterprise was recently rescued by an American businessman who sympathised with the aim. The Hiervandaan is now one of two wines assembled by a crack South African consultant winemaker from Swartland fruit to signal that Solms-Delta is back in business. This is a red you could happily drink without food and one that I liked a lot, but if anything it was a bit too soft and fruity for the beef.

I had also really enjoyed the latest release of Le Difese 2022, a delightfully accessible blend of Cabernet Sauvignon with Sangiovese from the same stable as world-famous Sassicaia on the Tuscan coast. The Sangiovese component added a bit of useful bite to the wine, and it was a decent match for the beef but arguably a little too light.

I then tried a couple of very different Australian reds from my tasting table. Swinney’s Farvie Grenache 2022 from the country’s south-west corner was much more tannic than most other wines made from Grenache/Garnacha — so much so that it almost tasted bitter. It may be delicious in the future, but it was too chewy for the beef. The best match among the reds was Henschke’s concentrated, slightly medicinal but extremely friendly — not too tannic — Keyneton Euphonium Shiraz 2019.

But I realised that I should also try a classic red bordeaux of the sort so often recommended with beef, so I got a bottle of Château Pichon Baron’s very successful 2012 out of the cellar, a wine that’s already drinking well but still has some tannin. In fact, trying the beef with both this wine and a St-Émilion, Château La Fleur Morange’s Mathilde from the chewy 2008 vintage, seemed to emphasise the wines’ tannins slightly uncomfortably.

I then opened the sparkling rosé I had in the fridge: by complete coincidence another Australian — a Jansz 2017 from Tasmania, based on this sparkling-wine specialist’s best block of Pinot Noir and bottle-aged for precisely 904 days according to the label. To be honest, I didn’t have great hopes, but not only was the wine attractively balanced and interesting, it really did go beautifully with the beef. I think it was the intensity of the combination of fruit and fizz that was forceful enough to counterbalance the chewiness of the beef. Or, to quote the much more lyrical Tamlyn (honoured recently by Pseuds’ Corner in Private Eye): “The Maillard-rich, deep-timbred, über-umami sweet savouriness and dense-velvet texture of the beef collides with the high-current, crystalline precision, fruit-saturated vibrating tension of the wine, and the effect is like a tiny lightning bolt in the mouth.” I’ll second that.

She’s really on to something here. I also tried the beef with the latest vintage (2015) of Veuve Clicquot’s top-of-the-range La Grande Dame Rosé — a much darker pink, incidentally, as seems to be the fashion in Champagne now. This combination also worked beautifully.

The fruit and fizz in the wine was forceful enough to counterbalance the chewiness of the beef

But Tam is not the only food and wine expert on our team. Managing editor Tara Q Thomas was a professional chef before turning to wine writing, and she has clearly given the question of matching wine to meat considerable thought. “From a cook’s perspective, the question is not so much what sort of meat you’re having, but how is it prepared,” she told me. “Think about the weight of the dish, and match lighter, brighter preparations to lighter whites, rosés or red wines. Earthier, darker-toned, weightier dishes will need a darker, richer wine to stand up to the heartier flavours.”

But, she continued, what counts the most is drinking what you like: “I knew a restaurateur who drank Condrieu with everything from salad to steak. It was his favourite wine, and it made him happy.”

Tara’s most memorable meat and wine combination, like Tam’s sparkling rosé suggestion, flies in the face of convention. It was at a small restaurant near Athens, where a huge plate of grilled lamb chops came with a bottle of white wine: an Assyrtiko from Santorini. “The chops were smoky, juicy, rosemary-scented and ringed with fat; the wine was mouthwateringly saline and high in acidity, cutting right through that fat. A red would have worked but it would not have been so energising, nor so surprising. It showed that white wines can work spectacularly with meat if they are savoury and firmly structured, like Santorini whites tend to be.”

If you care about what happens in your mouth, the lesson from all this is probably to experiment wildly. And certainly abandon that old “red wine with meat, white wine with fish” rule.

Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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