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

This week’s ‘Blow the Bank’ comes courtesy of Emma at New Zealand’s The Laughing Gastronome and a scrumptious Fish Pie originally served as part of this year’s annual Pie for Pi Day celebrated each…March 14th or 3.14.

Red wine and fish can often mix about as well as red wine and Coca Cola. And unless you’re Basque or from northern parts of Spain, where the people, in fact, do mix red wine with Coca Cola, assume it’s true – at least for most flaky white fish. The tannins in red wine cause white fish to take on a metallic quality that ruins its flavour. It’s not pleasant and will most certainly ruin your evening meal, if not also your evening. However, red wine with red fish (think tuna steak) is an altogether different story, which InterWined will reserve for a different ‘Blow the Bank’.

Where the French have bouillabaisse, the British and their former colonial descendants have Fish Pie, a mixture of white fish in a cream sauce with a crust made of mashed potatoes and cheese instead of pastry.

A French chef working in London once told InterWined that British cuisine would rank alongside French, if only the British had the mind to hold their regional dishes in the same regard as they hold French and cook it with care. Case in point: while the French esteem their fish stew as Provencal cuisine, few English-speaking people rate fish pie as anything other than old-fashioned comfort food.

So to rectify this injustice, InterWined forewent the pairing of Emma’s Fish Pie with a New World white wine and paired it with the 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle Bandol Rosé, from La Cadiere D’Azur on the southern coast of Provence and £13 from Philglas & Swiggot.

Due to the small size of Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle, this wine might prove difficult for readers to find outside of the UK or New Zealand, where it is available online from Caros wines. In which case, InterWined would recommend other Bandol Rosés. The key is look for a rosé low in tannin and alcohol. (Alternately, a Spanish Albariño or New Zealand Chardonnay would also make very good matches.)

The 2006 Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle is almost apple-juice in colour with a light bouquet and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a flavour reminiscent of currant. A rosé might at first seem a strange and unorthodox choice to pair with a fish pie, given the inclusion of cream in the recipe. (As with salt, wine often struggles with cream.)

Fortunately, the cream sauce included in Emma’s recipe is light, soft, and, due to InterWined’s mistaking a teaspoon for a dessert spoon, wonderfully akin to a cream-based version of the thin and delicate sauce found in bouillabaisse.

Emma’s Recipe in Full

Fish Pie
(makes 2 generous individual portions)

Click on the post to view and download the recipe

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