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.

Italy Comes to Bath

I have been to many wine tastings over the years.  But, for me, food and wine are meant to go together, so the tastings I enjoy the most – and get the most from – are almost always when the wines are shown as part of a dinner, accompanying well-chosen dishes.  A short trip across to Bath recently delivered this to perfection when our favourite restaurant in the city, La Terra, hosted an evening of wines from Umani Ronchi served alongside some of their own delightful dishes.

Umani Ronchi have extensive vineyards in the eastern Italian regions of Abruzzo and Marche and specialise in wines made from native local grape varieties, principally Verdicchio and Montepulciano.  After a welcoming glass of fizz, we settled down to a delicate smoked salmon mousse with generous glasses of Casal Di Serra Verdicchio alongside.  This is, perhaps, Umani Ronchi’s best-known wine – fresh and herby with some richness from brief lees ageing but completely unoaked.

In true Italian fashion, a pasta course, a raviolo filled with meltingly tender duck leg, followed.  I might have teamed this with a red, but instead we had another Verdicchio, this one from old vines and matured in old concrete vats, rather than stainless steel.  Softer and more savoury than the first and an interesting match.

Our one red of the night, Cúmaro Rosso Conero, a 100% Montelpulciano aged for 12 months in old oak barrels, was the ideal partner for the main course guinea fowl – the breast roasted and the leg meat slow cooked in a small pie.  An innovative, delicious dish and one that showed off the wine really well.

All too soon, we arrived at our final pairing.  Dessert was an orange posset with white chocolate.  I don’t recall tasting many sweet wines from this area but Umani Ronchi produced a botrytised Sauvignon, Maximo, from the Marche region.  Grown on north facing vineyards with high humidity, this had all the intense marmalade flavours that come from nobly rotted grapes and, of course, the link with the orange of the pudding was marked.

A wonderful evening where food, wine and the convivial atmosphere we always find at La Terra all came together perfectly.

The Problem of Umami

Many of my blogs talk about wine to go with food and it’s a part of the professional Wine course I’ve taught for years. So, you’d think I’d find a fair match when choosing a bottle for us to share over dinner at home. Mostly I do – or my wife, Hilary, suggests something else that turns out even better! But every now and then, I get it wrong, and that’s exactly what happened recently: lovely food (pan-fried chicken breasts with a Marsala sauce), lovely wine (a white Grenache Blanc-based blend from Corbières in the Languedoc in the south of France), it’s just that the 2 didn’t work together at all. The problem was the porcini (dried mushrooms) that were part of the sauce.

Now, as I regularly told my students, dried mushrooms have an ‘umami’ taste – a word of Japanese origin that roughly translates as pleasantly savoury.  It is quite distinctive and can be fairly pervasive and it’s also found in some cooked meats, meat broths and in fermented products including soy sauce.  And, umami can have a significant effect on any wine paired with it, emphasising the astringency and bitterness of any tannins and the warming effect of alcohol while, at the same time, robbing the wine of body, sweetness and fruitiness.  All in all, umami flavours are not good news when choosing wine.

So, where did I go wrong?  Well, in all aspects, really!  The wine I chose was moderately high in alcohol and, while there were no noticeable grape tannins, the wine had been fermented in new oak barrels, so there was quite a bit of wood tannin present.  On the palate, though attractively rich and herby, it wasn’t particularly fruity, even less so when tasted alongside the dish with its dominant umami flavour.  My original thinking of choosing a big, rich white with a hint of oak to go with the chicken in marsala was reasonable and without the porcini, it would have been perfect.  As it was, we drank water with our meal and enjoyed the rest of the wine later in the evening. 

A Daunting Match

Salmon is one of the most wine-friendly foods I know.  Its relatively neutral flavour will pair happily with most whites, many rosés and, depending on how it’s cooked, even with some lighter-bodied reds.  But a recipe that we tried recently changed all that.  We coated our salmon steaks in a Thai-influenced marinade of lime juice, Thai fish sauce, soy sauce, sesame oil, brown sugar, chilli, fresh coriander leaves, ginger and garlic.  With this daunting contrast of salty, sweet, sour and spicy flavours penetrating into the fish, I had to match the wine to the marinade, not the salmon. Quite a challenge as the wine had to have its own character if it was not to be overwhelmed. Tasting the marinade on its own didn’t help although 2 elements of it stood out: the lime juice and the sugar.  So, I was looking for a wine with good acidity to balance the one and a hint of residual sugar to take care of the other.  And definitely white; I couldn’t see a red or rosé working at all.  A Vouvray Demi-Sec?  A Riesling Kabinett from Germany?  Both possibilities but, as luck would have it, we had neither on our wine rack – my responsibility, mea culpa! 

But we did have Paul Cluver’s Riesling from Elgin in South Africa (Wine Society, £13.50) and I opened that.  Described as ‘dry’ but, according to the producer’s website, with 12 grams per litre of residual sugar so, technically ‘off-dry’.

It made a delicious aperitif with its vibrant aromas and flavours of lime, green apple and floral hints.  A classy wine with real intensity and length and tasting properly dry despite the residual sugar.  But then we tried it with the food.  The marinade had flavoured the salmon beautifully but it had become much more restrained and subtle with cooking and, really, a fuller-bodied wine would have worked better with the dish – something from southern Burgundy, perhaps.

Proof, once again, that food and wine matching isn’t an exact science, more an art.  But we enjoyed the food and left the rest of the wine for a little later in the evening.

Wine with Asparagus

You’ll often read that asparagus is a very tricky food to match with wine.  That’s a shame as my wife and I love it, particularly at this time of year when the English asparagus crop is at its best.  Somehow, the spears that supermarkets import all year round from South America don’t have the same flavour and the white asparagus, so popular on the continent of Europe, just doesn’t appeal to us in the same way.

But, back to my first sentence: is asparagus really a big problem for wine-matching?  I don’t think so.  Serve it with a vinaigrette and the vinaigrette may not be wine-friendly, but dress it with a Hollandaise or another creamy or buttery sauce and many crisp, unoaked whites will work perfectly. 

And remember the old saying about the wine of a country or region going with the local food.  The lightness and freshness of many modern English dry whites would be an ideal match.  Try Camel Valley’s Bacchus (Waitrose, £16.99), for example, or, if you want something special, the same producer’s Brut reserve is a delightful English fizz: clean, mouth-wateringly dry and appley (also Waitrose, usually £32.99, but a bargain if you can get one of their occasional 25% reductions).

Asparagus can also be a delicious ingredient in a main course.  A favourite recipe of ours combines some slivered asparagus with chicken pieces in a creamy sauce all served over fresh tagliatelle.  Here, the wine needs to be a little fuller to cope with the rich sauce, but, again, definitely not oaky.  We opened Aubert’s Vouvray Sec (£15.25), a wine that I first sampled a few weeks ago at a Yapp Brothers tasting for the Bristol Tasting Circle.  (See my blog ‘The Diverse Loire’ for more details).    I thought it was the wine of the evening then and this lovely, peachy Chenin Blanc was as good here enjoyed with a supposedly tricky food match as it was on its own under tasting conditions.

As I said, perhaps asparagus isn’t so difficult to match after all.

Red or White?

My wife and I have always enjoyed going out to eat.  Unfortunately, the Covid epidemic stopped this and, sadly, several of our favourite restaurants didn’t survive the shut-down.  So, now that the restrictions have been lifted, we’re looking for some new favourites.

Little French is a small, French-bistro style restaurant that’s been around for a while but, as it’s a long walk or a bus ride from where we live, we’ve never been regulars there.  But the food is good and the wine list interesting, so we paid a return visit recently.

When the two of us choose the same dish from a menu, it makes picking a wine rather easier, but that certainly didn’t happen this time.  Hilary was tempted by John Dory with asparagus while I preferred a bavette of Iberico pork – one an ideal match for a white wine, the other probably better with red.  (Although pork would often work well with a white, Iberico pork is an altogether darker meat suggesting a different wine pairing).

How did we solve the red or white dilemma?  Not with a rosé!  There are many dishes that can work well with good dry rosés but as a compromise wine, it’s rarely a good idea.  Some fish (tuna, in particular) pair well with lighter reds, but neither of us thought that John Dory fitted into this category, so it had to be a white, but one that would stand up to the pork. 

My eye was drawn to a section of the wine list labelled ‘textured whites’.  (I’m not sure how well that term would be understood generally, but that’s where I started looking).

Domaine Alary’s L’Estévenas Cairanne Blanc proved to be a very successful pick.  A lovely full, rich blend of Clairette and Roussanne from the southern Rhône (Cairanne is just a few miles from Châteauneuf du Pape), it had enough crispness and freshness to go with the fish but was robust enough to take on the rare-cooked pork.  And it was fine on its own with a few olives while we were waiting for our starters.

It was a long walk home – no drinking and driving for us – but it was a lovely mild spring evening and we both agreed it was good to be dining out again.

Wine with Stroganoff

As a descendant of someone who was forced to leave Tsarist Russia as a refugee at the start of the 20^th century, I really should be boycotting any dish with connections to that era.  But Stroganoff is just too tasty to miss.  Its precise origin is a little in dispute; the name may be linked to a Russian general and diplomat Pavel Stroganov, who, while visiting France, enjoyed the dish at a banquet in his honour, although a recipe for a similar dish appeared in a cookery book published in St Petersburg, Russia, some time before that.  A further possibility is that Charles Brière, a French chef living in Russia at the time, simply borrowed the Stroganoff name for the dish that earned him fame after winning the grand prize at a culinary competition.  Whichever is true, it’s a dish we like to cook – either in its original form using strips of beef or, to make a lighter version, strips of turkey breast work really well.

The key element of the recipe is that the sauce contains paprika, Worcester (or Tabasco) sauce and soured cream to give a mellow but spicy flavour – one that’s not as difficult to match with wine as you might suspect.

For the turkey version, we chose a full-bodied dry white from the Tokaj region of Hungary, better known for its luscious dessert wines: Pajzos Furmint (Wine Society, £9.25).   The local furmint grape is gently aromatic on the nose but rich and spicy on the palate with lovely peach and pear flavours and an attractive crisp, fresh finish.  It paired perfectly with the sauce as well as being a delicious aperitif accompanied by a few olives.  And, at less than a tenner, it’s hard to think of a better bargain.

Finally, on a different subject, you may want to look beyond bargains if you’re planning a celebration next weekend, but, given the occasion, what could be more appropriate than a glass of English (or Welsh) sparkling wine?

A Tricky Match

I’ve mentioned before in Bristol Wine Blog that Italy – and the south of that country in particular – is an excellent source of good value and very drinkable wines.  The warm Mediterranean climate that the area enjoys might suggest that the focus would be on reds and there are certainly some attractive examples to be found there.  But the hilly areas inland from Naples are a little cooler and for me, produce the best wines of the area: fresh, characterful whites from high quality native varieties such as Greco, Fiano and Falanghina.  I’ve noticed Fiano among some supermarkets’ premium own-label wines and it’s worth a try if you see one but, as none of these grapes is especially well known or fashionable, prices anywhere should be quite reasonable.

Italian wines are generally very food-friendly and are often my first choice to pair with possibly tricky food flavours.  And a Skate wing gently poached and served with a sauce involving orange and lime juices, fresh ginger and lemon grass has enough tricky flavours to defeat many wines; the citrus juices provide both a sweetness and a sharpness and the ginger and lemon grass bring in aromatic oriental flavours.  Added to which, skate is quite a robust fish and so the wine needs to be similarly full-flavoured.

Enter Calvese’s ‘La Gusca’ Falanghina (DBM Wines, £12.99) from vineyards in the Sannio region north-east of Naples.  A lovely, rich, mouth-coating white, completely unoaked with fresh flavours of lemon- and lime-peel that perfectly complemented the dish and with just enough weight from the 13.5% alcohol to neither overpower the food nor be overpowered by it.  All in all, an ideal pairing for a dish that might have proved difficult to match, although the wine was so delicious on its own as an aperitif, my wife and I were at risk of drinking it all before we even started our meal!

The Coffee Test

How do you like your coffee? Black? With Milk?

That may sound a strange question on a Wine Blog but one man doesn’t think so. I was watching an episode of ‘The Wine Show at Home’ on You Tube recently and the presenter, Joe Fattorini, mentioned Master of Wine Tim Hanni’s ‘coffee test’. I’d not heard of it before but Tim believes that, depending on your answers to 5 simple questions, you can find out the type of wines you ought to be buying. I was fascinated, so googled the questions:

1. Do you prefer your coffee/tea black?
2. Do you like the taste of scotch?
3. Do you prefer salty snacks over sweet snacks?
4. Do you prefer semi-sweet dark chocolate to sweet milk chocolate?
5. Do you think that cream/sugar in coffee/tea ruins it?

For every ‘yes’, score 2 points, for a ‘sometimes’ or ‘maybe’ score 1 point and for ‘no’ score 0.

Then add up your points. The higher you score (maximum 10), the more tolerant you are likely to be of intensely flavoured or tannic wines (or, similarly, powerfully flavoured foods). So, if you are up around 7 – 10 points, you’ll enjoy strongly flavoured foods but also big, rich, flavoursome wines.  You may find lighter wine styles quite insipid.

Scores between 4 – 6 show some sensitivity to tannins, bitterness and acidity in wine. You’ll probably prefer smooth reds and lighter whites, although may grow to appreciate some fuller flavoured reds or whites. As for foods, you’ll be happy with a range of tastes.

If you scored 3 or fewer, you are hyper-sensitive to tastes (and, as a result, would be a very good wine taster). Tannins, bitterness and acidity in wine will all hit you hard and you’ll prefer more delicate reds, lighter, more subtle whites and will delight in elegant, restrained food flavours.

My wife and I both did the test. I scored 4 which is, perhaps, a bit lower than I might have expected, but Hilary’s score, 7, is almost the opposite of the truth.

So, based on this very limited sample, I have some doubts, but do try the coffee test for yourself and I’d be interested to hear how it works for you.