How to dine with wine

Food and wine go together. That's the simple fact that so many wine aficionados tend to forget. They go banging the drum about this wine and that, completely forgetting that wine by itself is only half the story.

Taste a wine by itself (see-sniff-sip) and you should get to know whether it is simple or complex, dry or sweet, light or full-bodied. But have the same wine with food and it changes, depending on what food you are having: a tart white will soften with a lemon or tomato-based dish; a good Cabernet will reward the diner with layers of taste with a good steak; and a vintage port becomes sublime with blue cheese.

Conversely, a bad pairing can ruin the meal: think of dry whites with something sweet, reds with spicy curries, and anything with eggs, asparagus or chocolate. This is why people go to such lengths to try selecting the right wine with their food - and you've got to know something about both areas to do a good job.

Go back 500 years in Europe (when that whole wine thing really got going) and one finds that the cuisine was quite simple: roasted, baked or broiled meats with bread and cheese, flavoured mostly with salt and light herbs ("parsley, sage, rosemary, & thyme") - chillies or spices were much too expensive. So food pairing was also simple: white wine with white meat (fish & chicken) and red wine with red meat.

Things are more complex today, what with the fiery and spicy Asian cuisines that vary enormously in both form and content, as well as international cuisines themselves that have evolved into what's sometimes virtually an art form.

The mantra now is apparently to match weights: light wines with light cuisines (both in content and spice) and heavy wines with heavy cuisines. So it would be perfectly acceptable to pair a light red wine with, say, salmon, and a heavy white (for example an oaked Chardonnay) with Dum Phukt cooking (say, a Lucknowi biryani). Pairing recommendations need to keep in mind different spice thresholds: Indians in general have a much higher tolerance for spices and chillies than most people from the West, although many Keralite or Konkani dishes can reduce even Indian to tears!

I find that off-dry Rieslings and Chenin Blancs work well both with spicy and oily foods as well as preparations that have a hint of sweetness (for example pumpkin or kaddu preparations), while a Reserve Shiraz has the oomph to complement spicy meat curries like rogan josh. However, if your Indian fare is dal-chawal or roti-subzi, then a light chilled (yes, chilled) red will wash down the meal just as well as anything else.

Pairing Indian wines with food is still a work in progress, mainly because the quality of many Indian wines is both improving every year as well as tends not to remain consistent. However, many Indian wines are now an excellent match with continental cuisines, as a small select group of us found recently when tasting 13 wines with 17 courses at Toscano Whitefield (Bangalore), the Italian fine-dining restaurant set up by chefs Jean Michel Jasserand and Goutham Balasubramanian at the instance of Food Lover Magazine's Managing Editor Kripal Amanna.

While the full menu and the best matches will be written about in the next issue of the magazine, I noted the following stand-outs:

n Zucchini Escapesche (pickled zucchini, blanched almonds and tomato salsa) with a Sula Riesling
n Pepper Salmon alla Griglia (grilled pepper-crusted salmon with olive butter sauce) and Krsma Sangiovese
n Stufato di Coniglio (stewed rabbit and vegetable stew with polenta) and Big Banyan Limited Reserve Shiraz

Alok Chandra is a Bangalore-based wine consultant