Pairings | New Zealand sauvignon blanc
The best wine pairings for mangoes and mango desserts
Mango is often incorporated into drinks but what should you pair with it if you are eating it as a fruit or an ingredient in a savoury dish like a salad?
Mango has a natural affinity with citrus, especially lime which makes riesling a natural go-to for any mango-based salad or dessert. With a dessert like this luscious chilled rice pudding with alphonso and lime syrup from Yotam Ottolenghi I’d serve a late harvest or young auslese Riesling or a citrussy late harvest Sauvignon blanc
New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with its passionfruit flavours would be a good match for salads which feature mango - as would a Colombard or Colombard-Chardonnay blend with its own tropical fruit flavours.
Richer slghtly sweeter styles of Chardonnay match with savoury mango dishes like this opulent dish of chicken supremes with mango and cream, again from Ottolenghi.
With spicier mango dishes I’d try an off-dry Pinot Gris or, particularly if there was a ginger note*, Gewurztraminer. Come to think of it, a late harvest gewurz would be pretty sensational with a mango dessert too.
* As author and sommelier Francois Chartier points out in his book Tastebuds and Molecules ginger has an affinity with mango and consequently with gewurztraminer.
Wine and Indonesian food: which wine pairs best with Rijsttafel?
I posted this last year after trying Rijsttafel - the Indonesian speciality that’s widely available in Amsterdam. Translated literally as ‘rice table’, it’s an elaborate array of curries, salads and pickles which present a tough challenge for any wine.
The one we had was at Blauw, a restaurant strongly recommended by foodie colleagues and in the immensely useful Where Chefs Eat and couldn’t have been a better introduction to the genre.
The curries are hot but also sweet which tends to strip the flavour out of drier wines including the Gruner Veltliner we ordered, a normal go-to with south-east Asian food, although it matched a couple of lighter introductory dishes. Several also had a rich peanut sauce. The wines I thought would make the best pairings for Rijsttafel itself were off-dry whites though I came up with a couple of other options you might enjoy:
Viognier
Actually we tried a sip of this and it did work
Gewurztraminer - it wouldn’t match all the dishes but would be a good all-rounder
Off-dry Pinot Gris from Alsace or New Zealand
Barossa semillon would work well with the peanut sauces
Torrontes (a suggestion from Blauw’s own list)
Off-dry Clare or Eden Valley riesling like this Grosset riesling which was my match of the week a while back with a Chinese New Year feast
New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc with a dash of tropical fruit
Off-dry strong rosé such as those you get from Portugal and South America
Chilled New Zealand Pinot Noir - the favourite of the chef Agus Hermawan. Or Chilean Pinot Noir, for that matter. You need a touch of sweetness.
Ripe but not over-alcoholic Shiraz and similar GSM (Grenache/Syrah/Mourvèdre) blends
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