Condrieu and Cornish Brill salan

The idea still persists that wine doesn’t go with Indian food but when the flavours are subtle and the dishes presented individually you can pair some of the best wines in the world with it.

This was a dish at an amazing Indian restaurant in London called Bibi whose chef Chet Sharma has a fine dining background so it was really only the sauce they needed to take account of in their accompanying wine flight.

It was what’s called a salan which, according to Wikipedia, is “a mix of green chilli peppers, peanuts, sesame seeds, dry coconut, cumin seeds, ginger and garlic paste, turmeric powder, bay leaf, and thick tamarind juice”. I don’t know how chef Sharma made his but the peanuts and the coconut were the dominant notes. It wasn’t hot but was quite punchy.

With it we drank a glass of 2023 Condrieu Les Vallins from Christophe Blanc. A young wine but already richly expressive with a full, fruity (mainly apricot) flavour. (Condrieu is made from Viognier so if you were trying this type of dish at home and couldn’t run to Condrieu you could try other viogniers.)

You can buy it for £57 from Hedonism

For other viognier pairings see My favourite pairings for Viognier 

And for less usual ideas of what to pair with Indian food see here.

I ate at Bibi as a guest of the restaurant.

Tempura Jersey Royals and Jersey Royal vodka

You probably wouldn’t think of pairing wine - or any other drink - with Jersey Royal potatoes but then you probably wouldn’t be having them as the central feature of a five course tasting menu as I was at Pêtchi in St Helier in Jersey last week.

Of course there were other ingredients that influenced the pairings which were mainly wine-based but the two I was particularly struck by were the first two courses that were devised by chef Joe Baker: a Jersey Royal tempura and a fermented potato bread (below).

We’d been served a Seaweed Martini consisting of Fluke Jersey Royal Vodka, sake and kombu to kick off which I still had in my glass. It went surprisingly well with both dishes, which despite the other ingredients on the plate - the tempura was accompanied by a salted egg yolk and chill and the bread with dulse (another kind of seaweed) butter - were really all about the potato.

Later I tried another vodka, the luxuriously creamy Jersey Royal Mash which is made from larger potatoes that would otherwise go to waste which I sipped as a shot and reckon would have worked really well too. They produce one for M & S which sells for £30 in store and online from Ocado though you can also buy it from Amazon.

Maybe it would even go with chips!

For other vodka pairings see the best food to pair with vodka.

Roast lamb and unoaked grenache

Roast lamb goes with practically any red wine you care to drink with it but grenache is a less common pairing than, say, cabernet sauvignon or tempranillo.

It might also strike you as unusual that this dish was from a dinner at Tillingham winery in Sussex who you might have thought would have had their own red but it had sold out so they’d listed this intriguing organic grenache from Domaine Julien d’Abrigeon called Coquelicot (meaning poppy)

According to Vin-Clairs, the online retailer that sells it in the UK it’s made from fruit that used to go to the great Rhône producer J Chave for whom d’Abrigeon used to work.

It’s a beautifully balanced vibrant red that wears its alcohol lightly but had the richness and structure to stand up to the red wine and rosemary jus that accompanied the lamb along with some seared wild garlic, morels and crispy potato skins (as well as mash, which delighted this potato lover!)

It was made with indigenous yeasts and very little added sulphur so basically classifies as a natural wine though it was gloriously clean and pure.

With that back story though it should come as no surprise that it costs £30.40 a bottle although interestingly it’s under £20 in the US (at K & L). Taxes on wine in the UK are brutal.

For other lamb pairings see my Top Wine Pairings for Lamb 

And for other grenache pairings, The best food pairings for grenache 

Korean Bulgogi and Mencia

Given the overall punchiness of Korean food, you might think pairing it with red wine was a lost cause but as it’s often beef you’re dealing with, especially in a Korean barbecue restaurant, don’t let that put you off.

As part of my researches into wine pairings for Korean food I tried bulgogi twice last week, once at a London restaurant called Chung’dam and the other at an excellent local Bristol restaurant called Dongnae.

It’s a dish of thinly sliced meat marinated in soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, ginger and Asian pear then grilled on a tabletop burner or over a barbecue. So it’s deeply umami rather than hot but accompanied by sides and condiments including, typically, a soybean paste dipping sauce (ssamjang), raw garlic and chilli and kimchi and other pickles which you would think would be challenging.

Surprisingly the bulgogi marinade is powerful enough that they don’t throw the wine - in the case of Chung’dam a basic South African red from Journey’s End and at Dongnae an organic, low intervention 2022 Mencia from Bierzo in northern Spain called Quite from an impressively widely travelled woman winemaker called Veronica Ortega. It was definitely the more interesting wine of the two although the good news is that most full-bodied reds will go with bulgogi.

You can buy it from The Whisky Exchange online for £25.75 and from Cave in Bristol for £27.40

For other mencia pairings see here.