Chicken korma and viognier

I spent last week on the road in Ireland with wine importer Febvre hosting food and wine matching events for some of their restaurant customers. We covered a lot of ground from Enniskillen to Cork taking in Belfast, Galway and Dublin on the way and enjoyed a lot of amazing food matches.

How to pick just one? Well that IS difficult but I’m going for a really unusual presentation of chicken korma at a brilliant Indian restaurant called Ananda on the outskirts of Dublin.

They serve their food in a very unconventional way - first of all as separate courses rather than putting all the dishes on the table at the same time and secondly, by plating the meat elegantly and serving the sauce separately (see below for their normal plating). So this was a chicken korma unlike those you would have tasted before with an elegant piece of marinated grilled chicken and a rich indulgently creamy sauce alongside.

On the basis that the dish contained saffron I’d opted for a viognier, the Triennes Viognier Sainte Fleur 2014 from Provence and it worked brilliantly with the sauce. (With the dish on its own, interestingly. which also had a smear of beetroot purée we found a Henry Fessy Brouilly was an equally good match.)

Triennes, incidentally, is a collaboration between two top Burgundian winemakers, Jacques Seysses of Domaine Dujac and Aubert de Villaine of Domaine de la Romanée Conti. You can buy the viognier online in the UK from The Vinorium for what I think is the very reasonable price of £15. It’s also quite heavenly with Vacherin Mont d’Or!

Photo (not of the original dish at Ananda) © paul_brighton at fotolia.com