Sublime food & wine: Sip & Savour’s Alyn Williams & Symington Family Estates tasting

Sip & Savour indeed! Monday’s Symington Family Estates wine tasting and lunch at Alyn Williams at The Westbury proved an enormous success if I say so myself (I presented it).

Not that I’m taking credit. Knowing the wines so well and having read rave reviews about ex-Marcus Wareing chef Williams’ eponymous venture which opened around a year ago and just bagged a Michelin star, I knew it’d be a goodie. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited by a menu which, even on paper, I instinctively knew would fly with the wines.

Provenance and craftsmanship shone in wine and food both and Williams himself fielded a fantastic Q & A, generously and enthusiastically sharing with us the minutiae of each dish. Even the bread rolls and butter were, like the age dated tawnies, works of time – the former, a sour dough with a Guinness reduction made from a Tamagotchi (feed me!) starter based, he said, on “buckets of rhubarb water and yoghurt,” the latter whisked with toasted caraway seed and stout – little had I known it was a wine, food and beer tasting!

Here are my ab fab matches:

Carpaccio of western isles langoustine, pickled sea aster, lemon & olive oil curd, salted cucumber with Symington Family Estates Altano White 2011 (DOC Douro)

So many aspects of the dish spoke to Douro white wines, which I tend to find more vegetal than fruity, with notes of fennel, green olive, cucumber and celery salt, yep saline too. And if there’s fruit, it tends to be lemon. So this dish couldn’t have been more apposite. My only quibble being that the lemon curd was quite intense and a little sweet for the wine. So I dodged around that and enjoyed it later.

Roasted & marinated partridge/tea smoked onion/Keveral Farm vegetables/ryvita with Prats & Symington Post Scriptum 2010 DOC Douro and Altano Quinta do Ataide Reserve 2008 (DOC Douro)

Partridge is a much prized game bird of the Douro, which can be disconcerting when you’re the passenger and an excitable partridge fanatic is driving you around the Douro’s windy, vertiginous roads….Though roasted and marinated, the partridge was extremely delicate and tender, which worked brilliantly with the coolly mineral, elegant Post Scriptum. This dish I forgot to photograph (apologies), but its more powerful, earthier flavours worked better with the Altano Quinta do Ataide Reserve, especially the tea smoked onion (chamomile tea smoked with caramelised rice and sugar, Williams told us), hearty vegetables (beetroot, Cavola Nero) and “soil” of trompette noir and reduced malt. I’m not sure that the ryvita added much to the dish. I can only think it was a psychological ploy for the would be slimmers!

Manjari chocolate mousse/black cardamom /candied orange sherbet/gingerbread ice cream with Graham’s 20 Year-Old Tawny Port and Graham’s Quinta dos Malvedos Single Quinta Vintage Port 1999

Though the tawny only just won more votes than the Malvedos with dessert, for me it was the clear winner, in particular, a run away success with the line of candied orange sherbert. Perhaps it’s also a reflection of Charles Symington’s fine tuning of Graham’s age dated tawnies. He and his team of blenders have turned down the sweetness dial so that the new generation of tawnies have Graham’s moreish rich, sweet mid-palate, but are less rich and sweet – cleaner – on the finish. More on that another time, but the subtle shift in style certainly paid dividends with this dish.

Sip & Savour’s Amber Dalton is about to take a short (uncommercial) break – her second baby is due very soon – but it’s well worth signing up to her emailout list here to find out about next year’s programme which, I’m sure will be another sell out success. She’s got a fine eye for a restaurant and I fully intend to go back to Alyn Williams before too long. Their vegetarian tasting menu is highly rated.