Just about every Sunday night at Casa Tinto y Blanco we fire up the oven and have a roast chicken with a bottle of wine. Its become something of a tradition that ends the weekend on a high note, its much more enjoyable than ironing my shirts and folding my jocks for the week. Plus it gives me a chance to look wines, mostly white wines, from all over the place with some nice food.  I’ll be writing up most of these sunday sessions, mainlyjust  becasue I can. If you have any suggestions for either a roast chicken recipe or a wine to try with the chicken, leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

The idea isn’t to write tasting notes, but to try and find the best wine match with roast chicken. But as there is no real score and, well, its not really a challenge, I’ll choose my favourate from the year in December and nominate that as the winner.

This week it was a simple roast chook (smashed garlic, rosemary and a lemon up the date, oil, salt and pepper on the skin and into the oven) with some Coliban potatoes and green beans. The wine for the night was a white burgundy: Oliver Leflaive Chassagne Montrachet 2005. Now I tend to think that village white burgundy and roast chicken are a combination made in heaven, and this was not far off.

The wine is still quite young and fresh with plenty of acid to cut through that salty chicken wing, but with the body to deal with the lean breast meat. Well balanced and just the right level of flavour and body to suit the mild flavour of the La Ionica 1.8Kg chicken (we normally buy a 1.4Kg organic free range bird, but a jetlag induced sleep-in keeped us from the butcher til 1pm on Saturday). There is some smoky/caramelly oak in there that really sets off the flavour in the chicken too. Just coming into the start of its drinking window, this 2005 looks much better than it did this time last year and has changed my mind on this vintage for white burgundy (at this level anyway). Overall a good start to the roast chicken season.