Recommendations
Venison steak and parsnip purée with Cockburn’s Vintage Port 2007
On the plate is venison steak, briefly seared and kept rosé in the oven, next to a smooth parsnip purée. The 2007 vintage answers with dark fruit, tannin and a dry finish.
From the shelf
The bottle
Cockburn’s declared 2007 a vintage year. According to the trade press, the main blend consists of 45 per cent Touriga Nacional and 40 per cent Touriga Franca, supplemented with grapes from older plots; the fruit came from Quinta dos Canais and Quinta das Amendoeiras, and Miguel Côrte-Real was responsible for the blend. The wine is 20 per cent alcohol and comes in 75 centilitres. The house itself describes a very intense purple colour, floral aromas of violets and a rich cassis tone, with tannin that keeps the wine going for a long time. According to the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto, a vintage port is made from the harvest of a single year and bottled two to three years after that harvest, to then continue maturing in the bottle.
The combination
Why this works together
Venison is lean but full of protein, and that protein is the point of attachment for the tannin of a vintage. Zanchi and colleagues describe how tannin binds to proline-rich salivary proteins and so creates the dry feeling in the mouth; if meat protein is available, part of that tannin goes there and the wine becomes softer. The parsnip adds something else, namely a sweetness of its own and a creamy puree with milk, and that sweetness runs along with the fruit in the glass rather than against it. Because the port has shed its sharp edges after almost twenty years in bottle and finishes dry, the plate stays in the middle and does not turn sweet. Weight against weight it also adds up: a wine of twenty percent with tannin calls for meat with structure, and that is exactly what venison delivers.
At the table
The dish
- For 4 people
- Ready in 1 hour
- Type main course
What you need
- 4 venison steaks of about 180 g
- 1 tablespoon rapeseed oil
- 1000 g parsnip, peeled and with the hard core removed
- 500 ml whole milk
- a quarter of an onion
- 1 clove
- 1 bay leaf
- salt and freshly ground black pepper
How to make it
- Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.
- Cut the parsnip into pieces and put them in a roomy pan. Pour in enough milk to just cover the pieces. Stick the clove into the piece of onion and add it with the bay leaf.
- Bring to the boil and simmer gently until the parsnip is tender, about twenty minutes. Drain, but set the cooking milk aside, and remove the onion and the bay leaf.
- Purée the parsnip with some of the cooking milk until smooth. Rub it through a fine sieve and season with salt and pepper. Keep the purée warm.
- Pat the venison steaks dry and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. Sear them in a hot frying pan with the rapeseed oil until golden brown all round.
- Put the steaks in the oven for eight to ten minutes for medium-rare meat; if you want it more done, leave them a little longer.
- Let the meat rest on a rack for five to eight minutes. Warm it through for two more minutes before serving and cut each steak into four pieces.
- Put a spoonful of parsnip purée on each plate and arrange the meat alongside.
In the glass
Serving
A vintage port of almost twenty years old has sediment. Stand the bottle upright for a day and decant it carefully about an hour before the meal, until you see the cloudy part come to the neck. Pour it between 12 and 16 degrees, the band that the Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto uses for the ruby styles, in a tulip-shaped wine glass that you fill to a third. Bear in mind that this style deteriorates fastest: the institute gives one to two days after opening for vintage, so plan the bottle for an evening when enough people are at the table.
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