Wine Meets Spice

A wine tasting dinner at The Mint Room, Bath

I’m on a mission to break the myth that you can only drink lager Indian food.  So, with the combined support of Great Western Wine and The Mint Room Bath, we recently hosted a sell-out evening at the award-winning restaurant, showcasing a selection of signature dishes by talented head chef Soyful Alom, from different regions of the vast continent of India.

Let’s face it, most people just don’t know what wine to choose when eating or cooking Indian food – selecting wine is scary enough, let alone with heat and spice; and the safe default option is always lager.  But wine does work with spice – brilliantly; you just need to have a basic knowledge of what will work.

It’s all about balance and flavour; pour a glass of fresh orange juice in the morning and it will taste great; brush your teeth and go back to it, and it will suddenly taste like vinegar. Same with white wine and chocolate. It’s worth a try, if you can bear it, just to prove a point.  It’s all about enhancing and marrying levels sweetness, saltiness, sourness.

There are a couple of very basic rules here – forget acidic, wimpy whites and hard-edged tannic reds, these would be marriages confined to the divorce courts within 24 hours. For any level of spicy food, you need warm, characterful, aromatic whites, with a bit of spice themselves, and reds that are soft, rich, and sweetly spiced. It’s all about matching the levels of intensity of flavours and heat… a bit like boxers in the ring.

Consider this – Edinburgh and Marrakesh have wildly differing cuisines (haggis meets tagine); cultures are radically different; yet the distance between those two vastly different cities (roughly 2700km), is less than the distance from the Punjab in northern Indian to the tropical climes of Kerala in the south (about 3300km). However, the majority of us don’t realize the vastness of this amazing sub-continent unless we’ve been there, and lump the Indian provinces together into one amorphous mass in our minds.Let’s now take this one step further. The Indian continent is vast, yet there is still a view that, well, curry is curry, which completely belittles the dazzling richness, diversity, heritage and individuality of the various cuisines of this fascinating country.

One of the great parts of my job is that I get to explore – wine, food, countries – and then try to put all of them together, and try to impart a tiny bit of knowledge and advice along the way.  The provenance and heritage of wine fascinates me, the provenance of food, and style of cuisine does equally.  So my challenge to Chef Soyful Alom, who trained at the Taj in Mumbai, and is a wizard at meddling traditional Indian with a modern twist, was to create a menu, which featured dishes from at least 3 regions of India.  My challenge was to find the best wines to match.

Fortunately, Great Western Wine have a shedload of wines that fit the bill!  We kicked off the evening, with a selection of delicious canapé morsels - Chettinadu Satay chicken and Aloo Papaadi Chaat, a traditional Indian street food (little puffed up balls of wheat, looking just like cherubic baby pastry cases, with a filling of spiced chickpeas and potatoes, drizzled with a yoghourt and tamarind dressing). There’s sweetness in the peanut sauce and similarly in the tamarind, so we needed an aperitif white, with just enough sweetness and oomph to enhance.  Step up Malvasia del Salento 12 e mezzo 2014; this is a recent find of mine and a firm favourite whenever I’m cooking with spice.  It has a lovely, exotic, floral and peachy aroma, and smells almost sweet – which is just what it should do.  Delicately scented, yet, full of vibrant, musky, honeysuckle, lemon peel and ripe peach flavours, it entices with its scented promise and then gives you a welcome kick with its surprising zesty dryness, and zestiness.

The Mint Room served a platter of Indian delicacies as a starter – their signature Chicken tikka, with a mint sauce; Peshwari lambchops; and Punjabi-spiced swordfish.  Lots of traditional Indian spices in the tikka, and for the northern Indian, Punjabi and Peschwari dishes, warm, woody spices, such as cumin, coriander, cardamom, star anise, cinnamon and cloves prevailed.  Each of these had been marinated and then char-grilled, each infused, with their individual spice mixes and meltingly tender; Peshwari lamb, in its marinade of paprika, ginger and yoghurt was arguably the outstanding one of a very fine trio. What to match?  When you’re dealing with marinaded meats, and fish, chargrilled, with lots of spice, and a bit of heat, head to the safety of the most reliable of grape varieties for spicy food – Riesling.  This amazing grape variety has a calming presence and seems to be able to cope with pretty much anything spicy.  On this occasion, The Stump Jump Riesling, D’Arenberg 2013, was the perfect choice – bright, edgy, with  squeakingly clean, zingy freshness, a tingling fresh lime verve, yet with hints of honeysuckle and ginger – enough oomph and personality to cope with all the spices thrown at it; a deliciously vibrant, and characterful glass, which should be a staple for any spiced-up dish.

Chef Soyful Alom then transported

us to the southern, tropical land of Kerala, one of the most beautiful parts of India, a tapestry of wide beaches, lapped by the ocean, with thick forests and verdant hills.  It’s a land of spice, and gorgeousness – fishing is one of the key industries here.  It’s hot, humid and tropical – and it’s yet another part of India, where food is at the centre of their culture.  Here, it’s all about spice, coconut, ginger, turmeric – but especially coconut.

The second dish we enjoyed was a Seabass Moilee – a simple fillet of flakily soft seabass, perfectly cooked, with crisp, charred skin, served on a bed of spinach, with a Keralan sauce of coconut milk, mustard seeds, curry leaves, and traditional spices.   There is so much richness in this dish, and so many layers of complexity – sweetness, heat, creaminess, spiciness.

What to match?  I’ve learnt that anything with coconut milk can kill a lot of wines – it all goes back to that balance I mentioned.  In this case, I needed to balance not only sweetness and heat, but also texture – coconut milk is very creamy, but anything with high acid would just curdle, rather than complement…. So I opted for a white wine, which has a bit of sultry spice itself, and a fuller, fleshier texture. This was one hot and successful date, based on how our guests reacted – Yealands Estate Pinot Gris 2014 hit the mark here - aromatic, exotic, and spicy itself, with enough fleshy, creamy texture to match the dish.  This is a polished, buxom yet elegant white with a dry edge, full of nuances of ginger, apricots and nutmeg, yet with a punchy, refreshing, citrus kick on the end - Big thumbs up for this one from all the guests.  The lesson here is to go for the richer, creamier aromatic whites – Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, Viognier.

For our final course, we moved eastwards to Bengal…the traditional spicing used in Bengali cuisine is relatively simple, yet at the cornerstone of many classic Indian dishes - cumin, onion, mustard seeds, cardamom and fennel.  For this dish, Chef Soyful played on the ‘modern with a twist’ element, serving a grilled breast of Barbary duck, with a smooth, intense, tomato and spiced sauce.  This required a completely different style of wine; my initial thoughts veered towards Pinot Noir, but the intensity of this dish is striking, and we needed something with a bit more ‘oomph’, weight, and richness.

The solution? Bogle Old Vines Zinfandel 2013, from California. Bogle, a family-owned winery in Sacramento.  Here they make wines from grapes grown on gnarled old vines, which increases the intensity and concentration of the wines.  Voluptous and velvety are the two first words that come to mind; dark, brooding, suave, and silky are others. This red is crammed with intense blackberry and blueberry fruit, sprinkled with a dusting of dark cocoa, and infused with the warmest, richest of spices, with a hint of ground black pepper.   It’s also very fruity.  This is proof that bold red wines can go with spice, but you have to get the balance right – this one is generous, but oh so soft, rich, and silky, with no harsh edges – no clashes, no vying for supremacy, just a glorious fusion of flavours and tastes.

So there you have it… wine does meet spice… and can have a fairytale ending.

 By Angela Mount