Now, it's not as if I would decline an opportunity to subsist entirely on wine for an evening. In fact, given the calorific content of most alcoholic drinks, I sometimes wonder if my health would be better served by not eating on nights when I drink. Then I wake up the next morning in the middle of a massive sugar low, nearly faint in the shower, and resolve never to be so silly again.
So when invited to the launch of new Oxford wine bar, 1855, I was delighted to see that they had a tempting menu of food, all designed to go well with a glass of wine (or several). The tasters they handed out were encouraging, so I made an appointment on a cold rainy January evening to go back with a friend for "dinner". I mean, dinner. Actual food. And maybe some wine.
I started off on the Lo Sang del Pais (dammit, focussing on the wine again), which was a delightfully dry and elegant red wine. It went superbly with the tapenade, ordered as part of a trio of dunking things together with some "tomato confit" (chutney) and "onion confit" (caramelised onions), alongside some excellent chewy toasted sourdough. It took me some time to realise that the wine and tapenade tasted so good together because the wine had that slightly bitter, slightly oily taste carried by really good black olives.
The dunking things swiftly got wolfed down, the bread accompanied by some really stunning extra virgin olive oil and a rounded sherry vinegar. The tomato confit was particularly good, and I speak as someone who doesn't normally like tomatoes: the cooking had highlighted the fruity notes without overemphasising either sweetness or sourness. So we ordered a couple of meaty plates: pork rillettes for me, and the celebration terrine for her.
Alongside them I had a glass of Vourla, from Turkey. Turkey! I didn't even know they made wines, and here's a place that not only sells them, but does so by the glass. This came from the "sun-drenched" section of the menu (the Lo Sang del Pais was from "mountains and slopes"), and it's a pleasure to find a wine menu that has actually useful categories. The Vourla was just the sort of red wine you'd want to drink on a warm summer evening somewhere in the Med: as the menu notes state, it's full of "really soft, ripe... fruit...with spicy notes". I'd like to do better than the menu description, but it's worth emphasising that the descriptions here are about as accurate as you can get. It perhaps wasn't the perfect match with my pork rillettes, but I probably should have chosen a white or rose with them.
The rillettes themselves weren't, in fact, rillettes, but largeish chunks of pork, both lean and fat cuts, potted with clarified butter. The size of the chunks made them more awkward to eat, especially at a small table packed with wine glasses; a smearable texture would have been much easier to deal with. However, the flavour was good, with plenty of aromatic thyme and a good amount of butter. My companion was very impressed with her celebration terrine, a mix of chicken, duck and pork meats enclosed in pancetta. It was definitely a knife and fork job, particularly with the generic mixed salad it came with. Both dishes came in generous portions: you could very easily construct yourself a full three-course dinner here from what appears, at first glance, to be a menu of snacky things.
We both finished off with a glass of the Australian "Dandelion Wonder of the Eden" Riesling. This was a little drier and less oily in the glass than we had expected, but it was so highly aromatic that it still did a good job of following on from some serious reds. A refreshing end to a very pleasant evening: hopefully the first of very many I spend ensconced here.
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