“I mostly get the wine matching right, but on a recent occasion my friend’s wine was much better suited to the gnocchi I ordered than the wine I’d chosen to accompany the meal,” laments wine writer RICHARD CALVER.

I find myself regularly cooking Italian food at home and eating out at Italian restaurants.

It’s the inveigling, ubiquitous taste of the Mediterranean, rich in pasta, olive oil, tomato and fish with wine as a condiment that makes this style of cuisine generally engaging and satisfying. 

At home, I regularly make risotto and when I eat out at Italian restaurants I regularly order gnocchi (which when I make it at home often turns bullet-like) or rotolo or lasagne because I just don’t make them well. 

I mostly get the wine matching right, but on a recent occasion my friend’s wine was much better suited to the gnocchi I ordered than the wine I’d chosen to accompany the meal.

It had been a hot day and the heat lingered into the early evening. So instead of a red wine I decided to take a rosé to the restaurant, a local (Braidwood) Sapling Yard 2022 Grenache/Gamay rosé that I purchased from the Strange Alchemy bottle shop at the Kingston foreshore. 

It was on special at $21.99 a bottle, which seemed very reasonable as the winery sells it for $28. 

The label doesn’t disclose the percentage of each grape variety so I looked up the wine on the company’s website. It indicates a 95 per cent grenache, 5 per cent gamay make up.

That is unusual because the label disclosure rules in Australia permit a wine to be shown as 100 per cent of a particular variety so long as its got more than 85 per cent of that variety in its composition. 

In other words, if a single variety is stated on the label, the wine must contain at least 85 per cent of that variety. The rest doesn’t need to be disclosed. It can masquerade as completely of the one varietal. 

Grenache is well-known as a Rhone Valley grape although it originated in Spain and it delivers a brighter rosé than from other varieties.

I’m not a fan of the earthy, plummy grenaches that say Lake Breeze, Langhorne Creek, SA produces, although these wines are of high quality. I prefer other varietals to grenache. 

The Sapling Yard rosé is dry with a lingering apple taste and a hint of raspberry that, on a hot day, was great as an aperitif, that is before the food arrived. 

It did not, unfortunately, match the gnocchi served with peas and asparagus. The rosé just didn’t cut through the oil and cheese flavours (the latter produced by a generous serve of parmesan applied at the table). I believe a dry white wine such as a textural Vermentino would have gone better with the gnocchi. 

My friend had brought to dinner a Tempranillo Touriga 2022 blend from SC Panell, a Halliday five-star rated winery. The blend is Tempranillo 55 per cent and Touriga 45 per cent from McLaren Vale and Barossa Valley.

This was a well-balanced food wine, dry, medium bodied with bright fruit flavours that merged well with the gnocchi. It had a thyme-like finish and was mouth filling, an excellent accompaniment to Italian food despite the Spanish and Portuguese origins of the grape varieties respectively.

Although the flavours of the gnocchi were on the lighter side, this wine’s structure seemed well suited to the cheesy flavour that I kept tasting.

I later looked up the price of this wine and its $35 a bottle from the winery. I might have saved money but I took a wine not suited to what I had ordered. 

A teacher was asking the class to manipulate sentences so they produced the opposite of the original meaning. She wrote on the blackboard: “Children in the dark make mistakes”. Her most precocious pupil raised his hand and offered: “Mistakes in the dark make children”. She sent him to the principal’s office.