InterWined.com loves food almost as much as it loves wine, hence, its new weekly feature ‘Blow the Bank’.

Every Friday, InterWined.com pairs one great wine that exceeds the normal £10 ($20) threshold with one great meal, prepared following the instructions of some the Internet’s best food blogs, and picked for easy preparation.

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of Johanna at The Passionate Cook.com and a delicious Viennese-inspired Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken Breast with a Hazelnut Crust.

It’s a cliché of the modern world that the most ubiquitous of domestic birds and Burgundies should pair so well. But cliché or no, chicken and Chardonnay do generally compliment each other better than most. In fact, InterWined finds itself asking what wines other than Chardonnay were paired with chicken before their inexorable rise in popularity beginning in the mid-20th Century. The answer probably rests with Beaujolais (made with the Gamay grape) — an excellent partner for roasted chicken, which one suspects was the most often prepared form of chicken prior to the advent of modern cookers and the mass farming initiatives that gave rise to battery farming, a theory InterWined intends to test in a forthcoming segment of ‘Blow the Bank’.

Johanna’s Pear & Sage-stuffed Chicken is a kind of Austrian cousin to the great American-style fried chicken. But, where a good red wine may serve as an excellent partner for the kind of fried chicken that John T. Edge celebrates in his new book The Southern Belly, most reds would likely overpower the subtly of this more delicate and grease-free recipe.

Thus, bearing in mind that it all comes down to a matter of taste, as outlined in the first ‘Blow the Bank’ last week, InterWined turned its attention to a Chardonnay blend, specifically the blend of Chardonnay and Cortese (the grape found in Gavi) produced in the 2001 Alteserre Montferrato Bianco from Bava, £13.99 from Oddbins/$30 from Winerx.com and Tewksbury Fine Wine in North America.

(A quick glance on the Web proved this wine pretty impossible to source in Australia and New Zealand. As such, antipodeans might consider the Lost Valley Cortese, purportedly the only winery outside of the Piedmont to grow the Cortese grape.)

Straw in colour with a subtle creamy butter flavour, it complimented the pear (a common flavour note with Gavi) and sage very well, without clashing with the fried breadcrumb, hazelnut crust of the chicken. However, as with last week’s Canederli allo Speck, sage is the real essential flavor partner and one that goes well with Chardonnay. And, while somewhat of a predicable choice, it works nonetheless.

Johanna’s Recipe in Full

Pear & sage-stuffed chicken breast with a hazelnut crust, courtesy of The Passionate Cook.com
(serves 4)

Click on the post to view and download the recipe.

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