To be called the best restaurant in the world takes some doing, and that is exactly what Noma in Copenhagen is at the moment. I was fortunate enough to eat there last Saturday and the food was fantastic. Like any restaurant menus, some dishes were more to my taste than others, but the whole experience was something I will always remember.
The chefs are exceptional, no question about that, but what about the sommelier? If you are paying over £200 for lunch and various glasses of wine to accompany the meal, the question I always ask is is the sommelier doing a good job or a lousy one? It is very easy to fill a wine list with the greatest wines ever made, but where a sommelier distinguishes him or herself from a simple wine waiter with a huge budget is in the choices they make on their tasting menu.
After a series of amuse bouche - including radishes with edible earth, edible moss, a leak with a garlic puree and a smoked quails egg, the first course was Scallops and Grains paired with a 2008 Bourgogne Cotes d'Auxerre Corps de Garde from Goisot. The dish was outstanding, with the freeze dried, sliced and dehydrated scallops having an unbelievably concentrated scallop flavour. This, mixed with a selection of grains in a watercress cream, and a small pool of squid ink produced a taste of the sea and a selection of textures that blow your mind. To match this was tricky and the wine choice wasn't particularly well chosen. The freshness of the wine worked with the scallops, but the more dense flavours clashed a bit. I would have thought that a good Rhone varietal wine would have been a bit better choice, maybe even a grassier type of wine as well. Not off to a good start. The next pairing was Steamed oysters with green pickled unripe elderberries and the 2009 Bourgogne Aligote from Alice a Olivier de Moor. The wine was quite floral and peachy with a lighter, citrus, minerally palate. The fresher, zingy pickled elderflowers worked so well with the lemony elements of the wine, and then a very subtle smoky aroma of the oysters balanced well with the peachy notes. The sommelier has earned his money on this pairing, and deserves some praise for picking an unfashionable grape variety to match with a briefly consumed dish.
The next wine was a 2007 Le Bel Ouvrage Savennieres from Damien Laureau, and it went with potatoes. A potato puree, with 'vintage potatoes' - apparently from the 2009 vintage - a milk skin, potato chips with a yogurt whey and lovage sauce. The wine was quite rich and honeyed on the nose with a lot of ripe tropical fruit with a delicate clean palate with an ongoing melon flavour. A superbly pretty wine, and it was a perfect balance with the food. The plates flavours mixed creamy, earthy and oniony flavours, and these matched elements of the wine - spot on. It was a pairing that, combined, made a wonderful taste experience andpossibly the best of the meal.
Pickles followed. Not a plate of Onions and eggs, but a selection of vegetables including carrot and red beetroot that had been pickled in different vinegars. Accompanying these were a few discs of poached bone marrow and covered in a pork rib, brown butter and tarragon sauce. The wine choice was a 2008 Koehler Ruprecht Kallstadter Saumagen Riesling Auslese Trocken - a lovely wine on its own. The dish was alright, not great though. The bone marrow was pretty tasteless and appeared just to be there for effect and the vinegars were all you really tasted and not the root vegetables. Now I love a pickle, but this was a bit much even for me. Having said that when you put both vegetables and bone marrow in your mouth with the zingy dry German riesling, it worked. The creamy bone marrow texture went with the softer flavours of the wine and then the citrus and acid balanced out the pickled flavours of the vegetables. Then the tarragon matched a slight herbal note on the wine (or created one?) and it just all matched well.
The 'main course' was Ox cheek, roasted for 24 hours in hay with chicory, redcurrant wine and pickled conference pear. The food was fantastic, the Ox cheek providing full on beefy flavours, being cut by the light fresh pear. Unfortunately the 2007 Domaine Grange des Peres from the Languedoc missed the mark. It is a lovely wine, lots of big rich berries - raspberries and brambles - with a dark liquorice, spice and leather flavour and a big alcohol spike, but it fails to match anything including the beef. A gentler, ideally older or more subtle wine would do wonders here. An older Rhone red or maybe even a Touriga Nacional would have done wonders but this wine overpowered a delicate balance of a dish.
The second Riesling was a 2009 Von Horn Mosel Riesling from Rita & Rudolf Trossen. It was paired with Whey and bitters ice cream, whey ice and dill oil, a milk crumble and sorrel juice. Firstly, the grassy sorrel juice shouldn't have been there as it contributed little to the very subtle milky dessert. The dish was pretty dull until you hit the milk crumble and then you got a fantastic, slightly salty, crunchy flavour that was seriously good. The wine, all lemon and herbs, did work to a degree, but because the dessert was so subtle (crumble excepted) any sweeter wine was going to find it hard to work. This did well though, offering a gentle sweetness with this more savoury pudding.
Finally, with a Jerusalem Artichoke Ice Cream, apple slices, malt shortbread and marjoram leaves, was a 2009 Le Cormier Coteaux du Layon from Domaine de Mirebeau. This wine was rich and peachy, very soft aromas of melon and peach. The palate had some lovely bitter notes, mixed with crisp lemon, rich honeyed pear and a very clean finish. It all worked beautifully together. The dark malty notes of the dish, with the creamy, slightly vegetal ice cream, marjoam and crisp apple flavours balanced out with the similar flavours in the wine. The wine itself had harsher alcoholic notes that appeared to be softened by the ice cream, whilst the richer fruit flavours of the wine were cut by the tarter apple. The wine and the food together made a stunning end to this meal.Nobody is going to get everything right, and the sommelier at Noma hit the mark more often than not. The only big mistake was the wine to go with the Ox Cheek, but I was disappointed that the wine choices weren't more adventurous. If someone is prepared to spend a small fortune on lunch, eating things like squid ink and edible earth, they are certainly prepared to try more obscure wines. I longed for a Portuguese white, or red from somewhere in the eastern block or even something from a small new world producer. Instead it was all France and Germany and that is a bit unimaginative. A restaurant that makes bone marrow caramels should be a bit more adventurous in its wine pairings.
Noma Website
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