Languedoc rosé and Rick Stein’s chicken burrito

I generally go for a crisp, citrussy white wine with light Mexican dishes like this one - but I happened to have a bottle of chilled rosé in the fridge and it proved the perfect pairing.

The recipe, from Rick Stein’s excellent book The Road to Mexico is probably not what you would think of as a classic burrito - for which read more Mexican than Tex Mex.

It was much lighter, based on chicken in a limey marinade and topped with pico de gallo (fresh tomato) salsa, guacamole, chipotle crema and soured cream. 

What made it go so well with the rosé - the 2024 Alaina rosé from Laurent Miquel - was the lime juice in the salsa. Lime is great with rosé

You can buy the Alaina from Waitrose - it’s currently £13.50 but quite often on offer. (His cheaper rosé, Vendanges Nocturnes, which is also good, is down from £10 to £8 at the time of writing though quite possibly not by the time you read this.

But that would work too as would the typical Provence rosé though that would most likely be more expensive.

For other rosé pairings see the best food pairings for rosé.

And for other Mexican food matches see Wine, Beer and Other Pairings with Mexican Food

Hake with white asparagus, smoked caviar and gamay

You might instinctively reach for a glass of white wine with hake but red wine can work equally well. And not only when it has a red wine sauce.

This dish at The Blue Pelican in Deal which, despite the name, is an excellent Japanese restaurant, came with white asparagus, smoked Petrossian caviar and a sauce which I’m guessing included miso and mirin.

It was richly umami anyway which made it a an obvious pairing with the orange Beaujolais they had listed on the short, smart wine by the glass list.

But it was the red - a Domaine St Cyr ‘La Galoche’ Gamay from the same region that was the greater surprise, complementing the hake without overpowering the delicate flavour of the asparagus or the caviar.

It was, also a great match with a dish of pork belly with cockles and sansho pepper but then gamay almost always works with pork.

Although we kicked off with a white - an A Desconhecida Arinto blanco - you could perfectly well drink a red like this throughout a Japanese meal.

You can buy the La Galoche from Uncharted Wine for £20.29 or £21.95 from Cork & Cask in Edinburgh

For other Beaujolais pairings see Top Food Matches for Beaujolais (and other gamay) 

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.

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.