Curry and…..?

How do you match a wine with the assertive spicy flavours of a curry?  Many would say, ‘don’t bother, have a beer instead’.  But what if, like my wife and I, you don’t enjoy beer?  Do you just stick to water?  In reality, it depends; there are countless different variations of the dish – not surprising when my dictionary says that the word ‘curry’ derives from an old Tamil word meaning ‘sauce’.  How many different sauces are there?  It must run into the thousands.  So, rather than dismissing the idea of wine with a curry, it’s important to check what flavours are in the particular dish and see if you can match them.

A good friend (and her cat!) invited us to dinner recently and told us that she would be cooking Prawn Rendang, a dish from Indonesia or Malaysia.  I had an idea that it was a sort of curry but didn’t know any more than that, nor which wine I might take to accompany it.  I checked some recipes; typically, the ingredients would include coconut milk, chillis, garlic, ginger, turmeric, lemon grass, tamarind paste and sugar.  The ginger, lemon grass and tamarind are all quite fragrant and, with our friend’s assurance that she would be gentle with the chillis (hot chilli flavours are definitely wine killers!), I decided to look for a white wine with some aromatic qualities to it. 

A Riesling, especially one from Australia, or a Torrontes from Argentina, perhaps?  In the end, I settled on Kuhlmann-Platz’s Gewurztraminer from France’s Alsace region (Majestic Wines, £10.99 if bought as part of their ‘mix 6’ deal).  Quite full-bodied but cool and fresh with tropical flavours of melon, mango and lychee and peppery hints.  It seemed to work well with the dish, reflecting the deliciously aromatic flavours and sitting nicely alongside its restrained heat.

Wines made from the gewurztraminer grape variety are quite distinctive and some of the more floral, perfumed examples wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste but more elegant bottles such as this can be very attractive and solve the question of what to drink with mildly spicy curries.

449 and Counting!

There can be few businesses still operating today that can trace their origins back to the 1600s.  However, there seems to be an exception to that rule for wine producers in Alsace!  The 2 most famous, Hugel and Trimbach, date back to 1639 and 1626 respectively and are both still in the original families, while Domaine Paul Blanck and Leon Beyer are even earlier.  But the prize for the oldest, as far as I can make out, goes to Dopff au Moulin, based in Riquewihr, the same village as Hugel.  They are another family run concern (now onto their 13^th generation) and will be celebrating their 450^th anniversary next year.  Quite an achievement – even more so when you consider the turbulent history of the Alsace region that has yo-yoed between French and German rule for much of the last 300 years.  But, as the locals will tell you, they are Alsacien first and foremost and, while governments come and go, vineyards are simply replanted with fresh vines.

As with most Alsace producers, Dopff grow all the grape varieties allowed under the AC and offer a range of wines, white, red, rosé and sparkling.  We opened a bottle of their Pinot Blanc ‘Domaine Familial’ recently (Wine Society, £11.50); less well-known than Pinot Gris (aka Pinot Grigio), Pinot Blanc is, in my opinion, a much-underrated variety.  Dopff’s bottling spends a few months on its lees (the remaining yeast cells after they have converted the sugar to alcohol) to give an attractive savoury, almost smoky flavour which, together with a few years bottle age (we drank the 2018 vintage), made for a wine with admirable complexity (especially for the price).  Food-friendly, too; we teamed it with a salmon and prawn fish pie in a creamy sauce with a cheesy breadcrumb topping.

Definitely worth another bottle, especially to raise a glass for their 450^th next year.