What a great idea – a vegetarian wine case, complete with a booklet of recipes to accompany the wine. Or does the wine accompany the food? Either way, I applaud Waitrose Cellar for coming up with this. I applaud them even further for sending me a case to try.
The case contains six bottles – three each of red and white – A South African Chenin Blanc, a German-sounding French Gewürztraminer and a more French-sounding French Roquefortissime, an Italian Barbaresco, an Australian Pinot Noir and an Argentinian Malbec.
Inside the recipe booklet are six recipes, one to go with each of the wines. I quite fancied making the Sri Lankan Nut Curry but, even though he hasn’t explicitly said so, I’ve always had the feeling The Meat Eater doesn’t like nuts in curries so I decided to make the Spanakopita as I’ve made that before with no complaints (I told The Meat Eater I’d got the feeling he didn’t like nuts in curries and he confirmed my suspicions).
Waitrose’s recipe makes 20 small spanakopitas but as I have mentioned previously, I’m a lazy, impatient cook who avoids any faff, and fiddling about with filo pastry making 20 spanakopitas definitely falls into the category of faff, so I made one big spanakopita. And very nice it was too. You’ll have to forgive the terrible photograph, just be assured it tasted nicer than it looks.
The wine that went with the spanakopita was the Waitrose Cederberg Chenin Blanc 2013, which clearly has the vegetarian ‘V’ symbol on the back of the label (the only one in the case to do this).
I’m not going to even attempt to try and sound like I’m the slightest bit knowledgeable about wine, so I’m just going to say it was white and it was nice. The Meat Eater doesn’t drink wine (yeah, I know. Weirdo) so he accompanied his meal with a pint of non-vintage Tesco Summer Fruit Squash 2014.
The Waitrose Cellar Vegetarian Foodie Case costs £70. For more information and to order a case, visit the Waitrose Cellar website.