6th October 2007

Guardian Weekend - October 2007

The Gaucho restaurant’s Ryan Hattingh thwacks the bottom of a man who is leaning over a table pretending to be a cow. “This, “he says, “is the rump. And when I picture myself in the pampas with a fire, cooking dinner, that’s the cut I think of.

Fillet [the man – cow gets another prod], which comes from underneath the ribcage, is considered in the UK to be the prime cut, but it’s not necessarily, to my mind. It’s a lazy muscle, it doesn’t do anything and, though very tender, it’d fairly flat in flavour. In Argentina they like to work on meat. They like to chew, and they like a lot of fat in it.” They also make the perfect wine to drink with it. Known as cot (or auxerrois) in the south-west of France – where it is vinified into the dense, sober and sometimes tough “black” wines of Cahors – malbec, which is much plusher and juicier in its South American incarnation, has become Argentina’s signature red grape. The Gaucho knows its malbecs intimately and, with more than 50 on the wine list, is even able to advise on which cuts of beef should take which wines.

With rump, for example, we try Zuccardi Q Malbec 2004, a fleshy wine that seems to become more intricate and cultivated against the fibrous texture of the meat. I’m less keen on the match for the garlicky churrasco di lomo – Mendel Malbec 2004 is a gorgeously sophisticated wine from which the meat marinade seemed to detract- and discover that with the yielding flesh of a fillet I like the contrast of a structured more than a velvety wine.

But the real lesson of the morning wasn’t in the detail so much in as the reminder that malbec’s big –hearted, buff, outdoorsy character is made for a good steak. Buy any, and it’s hard to go wrong. If you want to practise with different cuts, bear in mind that Argentinians eat 68kg of beef a head every year. You’ll never catch up.