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.

Langoustine with calamansi and a Greek white

This week’s match of the week is the perfect illustration of the fact that the flavours of a dish that should suggest a wine pairing as much as the main ingredient.

The dish in question was a variant of one of the regular items on the menu at the uber-fashionable, Michelin-starred Dorian in Notting Hill: a tempura langoustine tail, with pale ale and ginger mayo, calamansi (a Filipino citrus fruit that’s like a cross between a lime and a mandarin) and chilli sugar. 

I wouldn’t have been sure which way to go with it but the sommelier came up with an excellent pairing of a Cretan white wine, Dafni, from Lyrarakis’ Pasarades vineyard which had citrussy notes of its own that echoed those of the sauce.

White Bordeaux and albarino would have worked too, I reckon.

You can buy the 2023 vintage from Hedley Wright in the UK for a very reasonable £13.99 and for £15.99 from Cambridge Wine Merchants which is still good value for a wine of this quality.

For lobster pairings (which are similar to langoustine) see Wine with Lobster: 6 of the best pairings

Ceviche and Friulano

My visit to Santo Remedio whose third branch recently opened in Marylebone reminded me how much I’ve missed Mexican food since I got back from CDMX and Oaxaca in November.

Of course you can find ceviche all over the place - it’s Peruvian rather than Mexican but it’s popular in Mexico too.

This was a dish of seabass with guanoabana juice and habanero - not as hot as it sounds from the description but still with a bit of a kick. Guanabana is the Latin American name for soursop, a fruit with - as the name suggests - a slightly sour citrussy flavour.

For that reason I generally steer clear of similarly sharp wines with ceviche and go instead for an aromatic white - in this case a fragrant Antonutti Friulano from north-east Italy which actually went extraordinarily well though not quite as well with the fish tacos that followed it.

Still, in a Mexican meal like this which involves a succession of different small plates you can’t be constantly chopping and changing. I’d move on to a red with dishes like birria and pork pibil though.

You can buy the Friulano from Albion Wine Shippers for £13.96. Their website doesn’t specify the vintage but the label is a different colour which suggests it’s not the same one I had in the restaurant. Check if you’re interested in following up.

I ate at the restaurant as a guest of Santo Remedio

Arbroath smokie mousse and leeks with Vinho Verde

I’ve been dying to eat at The Goods Shed in Canterbury since I first walked through its doors and was blown away by the range and quality of the produce they have on sale there and I finally made it last week.

It’s a bit like an indoor farmers’ market with different stalls including a first rate butcher and fishmonger. They also have a small restaurant space down one side that makes full use of the ingredients that are on display.

They’d sadly run out of crab tart but told us there was a replacement dish of Arbroath smokie mousse with poached leeks and radishes. I’m guessing the smokie, which is a type of smoked haddock, was poached in milk then anointed with drops of leek- or maybe parsley-infused oil.

Anyway it was absolutely delicious and a brilliant match for the 2023 Azevedo Vinho Verde I’d picked off the list, a blend of alvarinho and loureiro. Crisp, dry and slightly saline as opposed to the spritzy off-dry style that the region used to produce.

It’s great value too. You can buy it currently from Waitrose  for £9.99 though it is quite often on promotion.

Albarino would of course work with that sort of dish too.

For other alvarinho - and albarino - matches see

The best pairings for albarino (and alvarinho)