Gourmet specialist Karen Anand chats with Hotelier India on how to combine top selling Indian dishes with the right kind of wines.
Wines and Indian food haven’t joined hands in the past simply because Indian food is unexplored territory.
Most work on food and wine pairing has been done by European and American food writers who have naturally chosen their own cuisines to work with.
It is only in the last 10 or 15 years that wine writers from Singapore, Hong Kong and now India who are now on the pairing scene have started realizing that you have to seriously study pairing wines with Indian food otherwise people will only think of wines as a party drink.
It is all part of an education process and a challenging and fascinating one at that.
To give you examples of the recent initiative with Good Earth Wines and JW Marriot’s chef Shadab; his food is quite pure Lucknowi and these dishes, full of aromatic spices and light on chilli, pair favourably with Good Earth wines.
I especially like his galawati kebab, which makes a fabulous combination with the Aarohi, an Old World style Sauvignon Blanc and the Nalli Nihari combined with the Basso, which is a Bordeaux style Cabernet Sauvignon full of intense berry notes. The aroma and taste of oak in the wine is lovely with the subtle spices of the lamb shank.
Some of the key factors to keep in mind while serving wine with Indian food are that very spicy food will overpower your wine. So while several spices such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves and surprise surprise! even mild chilli can go well with wine, when ground into a masala, they will overpower your wine.
Coconut gravies combined with wine result in a ‘paneer effect’ soon after consumption. So while coconut gravies are less spicy on the palette and may seem like a good idea as they will not overpower the wine, this combination should be a strict no-no.
So stay clear of serving wine with spicy, Goan fish curries or Thai green curry. Chaats and anything with tamarind or yogurt should also be left out of the wine pairing list.
Oily food as a rule does not combine well with wine. The only exception to this is if the meat or fish you are serving is of such superb quality that it transcends the oil or ghee floating on top.
Again, it isn’t a good idea to serve wine with food that contains too much vinegar, especially with salads that have sour dressings. Too much tomato sauce in the dish will also render it a bad combination with wine.
In terms of other cuisines that are popular in India and wine, Thai dishes are generally too spicy and sour for wines. The easiest to pair with wine would remain any southern European cuisine.
The reason why these countries have cuisine that pairs so impeccably with wine is that since they produce wine, their dishes naturally pair with wines – French of course, Italian, Spanish and Greek. Even Middle Eastern cuisine, which is gaining popularity in India, pairs well with wine to a point.
Cuisine native to other countries which have a place on the wine circuit like Australian, South African and Brazilian cuisine are also fairly easy to pair with wine.
Cuisine from other countries of South America is also easy to pair with wine. Among the South American fare, Mexican food can be very spicy and therefore tricky. Chinese food is a tricky one.
F&B outlets which serve Chinese food and would like to offer their guests wine to go well with Chinese food, should follow the same principles as with Indian.
Karen Anand’s Guide to Pairing
Karen Anand is using examples of Good Earth Wines with food we eat in India. Restaurants using other wines, could look for wines with similar characteristics. Equivalents should have characteristics as follows
Arohi – a Sauvignon Blanc. It is medium bodied, grassy, herbaceous, but also full of passion fruit, guava and banana.
Basso – a Bordeaux style Cabernet Sauvignon full of intense berry notes. It is medium-bodied and has hints of blackcurrants and pepper. A pleasant whiff of burnt toast gives way to touches of plum and blackberry, oak and fruit.
Brio – a Shiraz. It is Medium bodied, purplish red in colour. Brio exhibits complex spiciness; predominantly black pepper, but tempered by the sweetening influences of blackberry and plum.
