Pairing whisky with Indian food

Among the many invitations I get to food and drink matching events a recent one to attend a dinner at the Bombay Brasserie in London where each course was paired with whisky sounded the most intriguing. But pairing a high strength spirit with spicy food was surely a recipe for disaster?

As it turned out it was a) not that unusual - a number of Indian whisky dinners have been held before and b) a revelation - the whiskies went much, much better with the food than I could have imagined.

The pairings had been devised by the restaurant’s head chef Sriram Aylur in conjunction with whisky expert (and old friend and colleague) Dave Broom, a brilliant master of ceremonies. The whiskies, which were served blind, could be from anywhere in the world, we were told.

It was a relief to find that almost all the assembled company of whisky experts got at least one of them wrong (at a wine event a few clever clogs would have made the rest of us feel totally inadequate). The gentle sweet aperifif whisky, for example was not Scotch, not a 10 year old as suggested, but a 3 y.o. Indian single malt called Paul John (it turns out there are quite a few Indian whiskies).

We then had a delicious bitter-sweet cocktail created by mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana, a mixture of Eagle Rare 10 y.o. bourbon which Ryan described as ‘grown-up Buffalo Trace’, Cocchi Americano which is rich in quinine and a homemade turmeric liqueur infused with cloves, cardamom, cinnamon and coriander seed. There was also a basil garnish though I didn’t pick up a lot of flavour from that.

The first food pairing was palak patta chaat, crisp baby spinach with a mango dressing that was paired with a sweet, fragrant Balvenie 14 y.o. aged in Caribbean casks seasoned with three types of rum. The tropical fruit flavours chimed in really well with the mango.

Next we had two spicy fish dishes with a big chilli hit - prawn tokri and a masala-coated tilapia which was successfully partnered - to everyone’s surprise - with Johnnie Walker Blue Label. (Several thought it was a whisky aged in a Sauternes cask.) Dave said that blends were often easier to match with food because they were ‘inherently complex spirits’ whereas “single malts are all about the intensity of a single flavour.”

The main course, although plated individually, was much more what people would think of as a typical Indian meal: lamb rogan josh, chicken biryani, a dal, a spicy potato dish called aloo Katliyan, paratha and yoghurt. The lamb was possibly the hardest element to match but the other components all went well with another surprising choice of whisky: the fragrant, honeyed, slightly smoky Barry Crockett Legacy Single Pot Still whiskey from the Midleton distillery in Ireland.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the dessert (probably just as well . . .) but the last two pairings were apparently Ardbeg Uigeadail with a milk pudding with berries andmalai kulfi (not totally convincing, I was later told) and Glenfarclas 20 y.o.105 with chocolates.

Two thoughts overall: first of all that some degree of sweetness - as with wine - is the key to matching whisky with spicy food. None of the whiskies had a powerfully woody flavour, particularly when diluted, thus avoiding the tannins that can cause problems with chillies and spice.

And you do need to water them down. Nick Morgan of Diageo, who I was sitting next to, says that you shouldn’t hesitate to dilute them to 12-13%, a similar strength to wine, i.e., in some cases, less than a third of their original strength. I found that made them much more palatable but it does diminish their individual character. You could also serve them with soda, Dave Broom suggested.

So maybe it’s India - and other Asian countries who don’t hesitate to put whisky on the table - who’ve got it right and not us? “In India they don't have our hang-ups about whisky and food not going together” said Dave. “We can learn something from the rest of the world.”

This article was first published in September 2012. I was invited to the dinner as a guest of Diageo.

Pairing Indian wine with Indian cheese

Chef Shaun Kenworthy reports on what he believes to be a unique tasting of Indian wine and Indian cheese.

Shaun writes: "There is a rumble of change in almost every facet of life in today’s India. If we go back not too many years the idea of drinking wine as opposed to whisky and any other cheese than the processed stuff that the whole country has a fascination for made by enormous companies such as Amul and Britannia were little known anomalies.

That said, India does have an artisanal tradition of cheese and wine making that goes back a couple of hundred or so years to the Portuguese and British. A scant few traditional cheeses are still made in the mountainous regions of northern India and I’ve personally taken some around the world demonstrating with them and showing them off but how much longer they have left, being made in such small quantities is sadly anyone’s guess.

India’s wines have traditionally been produced along the hilly ridges of southern India, which run through Maharashtra and Karnataka but by the 1950s whatever little interest there was in wine, dwindled once India became independent and it wasn’t until the 90s, that a whole new generation of winemakers started to come through using modern wine making techniques.

There has been much talk about Indian wines in India recently, so much so that sales have been doubling each year, with all the 5 star hotel chains and higher end restaurants in the major Indian cities putting home-grown wines on their lists.

A sommelier friend of mine, Keith Edgar and I were recently asked by the Calcutta Wine Club to do a cheese and wine tasting. It was such a great opportunity that we decided to do a completely blind tasting of four wines and six cheeses so that we could keep secret the fact that they were all Indian.

I’m not quite sure what the members were really expecting but more than likely some domestic and imported wines and imported cheeses?! Of which there are few that find their way into the supermarkets other than the likely suspects such as ricotta, mozzarella, gouda, parmesan, cheddar, Danish blue and brie although as hoteliers with access to wholesale suppliers we do get much more to choose from.

The local cheeses I chose were fresh and smoked Bandel, both a little salty and crumbly in texture, round and small in size, still produced in a small Portuguese settlement town, around 60km from the city, Kalimpong cheese which is still made in 12kg and 1kg wheels by a few different cheesemakers, the texture being like a rustic Caerphilly: white and crumbly in the centre and yellowy inside the rind with a bit of a tang. It’s made in Kalimpong, a small hill station around 200km from Calcutta.

The other three, relatively new cheeses made by La Ferme, Auroville, in the old French city of Pondicherry, close to Chennai (formerly Madras): a good strong tangy Cheddar, their Auroblochon (but don’t let the name seduce you into thinking otherwise - this cheese is similar to an intensely ripe Pecorino) and their delicious semi-soft Gorgonzola.

Thankfully it’s easier to introduce our wines for the evening as you’d know what to expect from the grape varieties but again they were all Indian: a Sula Sauvignon Blanc 2012*, Fratelli Sangiovese 2011, Four Seasons Cabernet Sauvignon 2011and finally, India’s only dessert wine, Sula’s late harvest Chenin Blanc 2012.

We started off, as you would expect, with the milder cheeses and lighter wines, not wanting to make this too challenging a test for the wine club. After much discussion and many ooo’s and aaah’s, we ended up with very few hits but at least we’d conducted what was probably the first completely Indian cheese and wine tasting in the world to date!

Our top Indian wine and cheese pairings:

Sula Sauvignon Blanc 2012

I think we both expected this to go better with the salty fresh Bandel but it wasn’t unpalatable and maybe a little extra fattiness in the cheese would have helped

Fratelli, Sangiovese 2011

A good pairing with the fresh and smoked Bandel and Kalinpong

Four Seasons, Cabernet Sauvignon 2011

The smoked, Kalimpong and the hefty cheddar worked best

Sula late harvest Chenin Blanc 2012

And I don’t think anything could take away from this star of the show with the Auroblochon and the Gorgonzola."

For more information about Indian cheese read this article in the Telegraph, Calcutta.

UK-born and bred, chef Shaun Kenworthy began his career in Yorkshire but worked for some of London’s best known restaurants including Bibendum, The Atlantic Bar, Coast, Air, Mash and Quaglino’s. Since he arrived in India in 2000 he has worked as an executive chef and consultant in Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad. In whatever little spare time he has left he writes about his love of good food.

* which seems to be available in the UK if you'd like to try it.

Wine and spice

To mark National Curry Week here's an article I wrote for Decanter a while back about Indian food and wine matching at the Cinnamon Club which still contains some useful advice about wine and spice pairing:

Despite the stoic resistance of a stubborn minority who maintain that beer is the only acceptable option with a curry, most fans of Indian food have come round to the idea that wine can be an equally enjoyable accompaniment. Especially in London which now has some of the most sophisticated Indian restaurants in the world.

Much of the credit for this is due to pioneering sommelier Laurent Chaniac who, together with chef Vivek Singh, has incorporated a gastronomic menu paired with serious wines into the regular menu at London’s fashionable Cinnamon Club - the first Indian restaurant to take wine this seriously. They also hold regular winemaker dinners.

Now Chaniac and Singh have taken their mission a stage further by attempting to pin down the effect that individual spices, or groups of spices have on wine and which types of wines they suit. They have discovered, for example, that onion seeds and carom seeds (also known as ajowan) soften the tannins and open up the fruit of young wines such as red Bordeaux and Cote de Nuits burgundies. They also deal with any herbaceous notes in young cool-climate cabernets. “Normally that kind of wine is an enemy of Indian cuisine” says Singh.

Other discoveries are that tamarind, the sour paste that is widely used in southern Indian cooking and which is sometimes used by Singh as a glaze for meat or fish, has a strange affinity with the earthy flavours of pinot noir that is made in the traditional way in open top fermenters. That the fragrant combination of mace and cardamom fires up New Zealand sauvignon blanc and that sandalwood (used by Singh in a tandoori chicken dish) hits it off with gewurztraminer.

Of course in the sophisticated world of Indian spicing, spices are rarely encountered on their own even within a single dish but are skilfully blended so that none predominates. “You should never be able to detect turmeric in a dish, for example” says Singh “but it will very often be there” But the presence of certain spices or spices of a certain style can lead the wine choice in a specific direction, wine becoming part of the overall harmony of the dish.

“When we work on pairings we always look at the spices before we look at the basic ingredient” says Chaniac. “The first issue is the level of heat. That doesn’t necessarily mean how hot it is - it can be a question of concentration.” “Some spices, such as chilli, cloves and cardamom, create heat in the body” chips in Singh.

“When you have a hot dish you need to go for a wine, usually white, with refreshing acidity and a certain amount of residual sugar” continues Chaniac. "The acid tones down the heat and leaves room for the fruit to express itself." An example in the Cinnamon Club Cookbook (£20 Absolute Press), in which he gives wine pairings for all the main recipes, is a dish of deep fried skate wings with chilli, garlic and vinegar, partnered with Australian riesling. Fresh spices and herbs such as green chillies, garlic, ginger and coriander also tend to suggest high acid whites rather than riper, barrel-fermented ones or reds.

For dishes dominated by dried chillies and other warm spices such as cloves the pair diverge , Chaniac tending to favour aromatic whites such as gewurztraminer and Tokay pinot gris and Singh mature, soft reds. “A red wine needs to be concentrated but with soft tannins and a finish which is quite dry” concedes Chaniac. “Older vintages can have a role to play. We like old-style Barossa wines, older vintages of wines like Grant Burge’s Holy Trinity but they’re hard to get hold of. Alternatively we look for a wine that can generate freshness like a cool climate pinot noir or a young grenache.” They tend to serve their reds cooler than average. “All our reds are in fridges held at 16° or 17°C.”

Individual spice blends can unpredictably buck the trend, “If you take a classic pickling spice mix composed of cumin, onion, fennel, carom and mustard seeds, mix it with star anise and then combine it with a grape such as cabernet franc from a very hot climate a wonderful alchemy will take place” rhapsodises Chaniac. “The grape will tend to release aromas of eucalyptus and liquorice which then marry perfectly with the flavours from the pickling spice mix.”

The pair are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is accepted practice in food and wine matching, challenging even their own preconceptions. Their general view is that oak doesn’t tend to work with spicy food but they have discovered that barrel-fermented chardonnay has a real affinity with cashew nuts and toasted sesame seeds. “We also came across a fabulous match recently of Chapoutier’s Le Mal white Hermitage 1997 (100% Marsanne) with a dish of prawns flavoured with star anise, cinnamon and cloves.” recalls Chaniac. “The honey and citrus flavours of the wine were stunning with the dish but the common thread was the liquorice flavour of both the wine and the food, accentuated by the smoky flavours of the tandoor.”

At the same meal Chapoutier had pulled another clever trick. “We were tasting a Cote Rotie that was structured and quite dense and he showed us that when you ate a few raw coriander leaves it became more lively and longer on the finish. Now we’re looking at the effect of herbs on wine too. We’ve already found that where mint is a component of a sauce an Australian style of shiraz works well.”

One word of warning: these pairings won’t work in a conventionally structured Indian meal where several dishes are served at once. At the Cinnamon Club they’re served as courses, Western style. And don’t serve your dish with a chutney unless it’s specifically designed to go with the recipe. “I don’t like people asking for a selection of chutneys as the balance of the dish can get lost” says Singh. “With a chutney there’s so much going on - sweet, sour, bitter. It stays on the palate for a long time.”

The Cinnamon Club is at Old Westminster Library, Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3BU. Tel (44) (0)207 7222 2555. www.cinnamonclub.com

Other spicy combinations
Some spices are more powerful than others. Coriander seeds, for example, don't tend to affect a wine choice unduly while dried chilli (especially smoked), cloves and saffron, even if used in quite modest amounts, do. Here are some ideas drawn from other cuisines:

Black pepper - best with lush, ripe reds (but not syrah from the Northern Rhone. The pepper flavours cancel each other out!)

Cinnamon - in savoury dishes: rioja and other oak matured Spanish reds; in sweet dishes, especially with apple: late harvested riesling

Cloves - very ripe, full bodied reds e.g. grenache, reds from the Douro

Cumin (especially when roasted) - sharp lemony whites, such as Greek whites

Fennel (and dill) - minerally or citrussy sauvignon blancs, dry Italian whites

Fresh ginger - gewurztraminer or, surprisingly, champagne

Pimenton and other smoked dried red chillies - soft, ripe reds, especially tempranillo

Saffron - strong dry ross and viognier

Star anise/five spice, especially with duck - new world pinot noir

This article was first published in Decanter in April 2005.

The Cinnamon Club holds regular wine events. See the latest ones here.

What Food, What Wine? Indian: which type of wine pairs best with a curry

A lot of people still think that wine isn’t a good match with spicy food but our final session of What Food, What Wine? judging this week suggested that there’s no reason for winelovers to throw in the towel. The success (or otherwise) of the pairings did however depend on the heat of the curries and how ‘wet’ or dry they were.

We had four to consider - a chicken korma, a lamb rogan josh, a chicken tikka masala (which appeared in last year’s line up) and stir fried prawns with tanjore spices, the signature dish of the Cinnamon Kitchen in the City where the judging took place. (Amazing - you can find the recipe here)

The situation was slightly unreal in that we had each dish separately with boiled rice whereas in many restaurants a range of different dishes would have been put on the table at once along with sides like raita and chutney. But it was the most comprehensive attempt I’ve witnessed to find out which style of wines suits which type of curry and produced some fascinating insights.

Shop-bought or home-made?

There’s a big difference between inexpensive supermarket curries and a good takeaway or homemade recipe using freshly ground spices and fresh herbs. The prawn dish was far more aromatic and complex - and subsequently more challenging to match. I’m sticking my neck out here but I’d say on the strength of this tasting that it’s probably only worth spending over £10 on a bottle with a subtly spiced dish, served Western-style on its own - as you get in high end restaurants.

Consider the protein

If the basic ingredient has a prominent flavour it can dictate the match, despite the style of the dish. For instance lamb has much more influence on a pairing (inclining you towards a red) than chicken where it’s the sauce that’s all important

Beware whole spices ...

A rogue chilli or whole cardamom can really blow your wine out of the water. Fresh, well-sourced whole spices will be more powerful than mass-produced ground ones

...and heat build-up

Spicing plays havoc with the palate in ways you don’t quite anticipate. It can anaethetise the palate to an extent but with some dishes there was a slow build of heat making each mouthful taste progressively spicier. Which is where cooling raita comes in ....

So which style of wine pairs best?

Judging by the wines we tried a fruity rosé is the best all rounder - a good default choice when you’re in an Indian restaurant.

White wines - even aromatic ones - are trickier than you might think. Sauvignon Blanc in particular is not the success it tends to be with other dishes. A touch of sweetness certainly helps as does a touch of minerality, according to the Cinnamon Kitchen’s group wine buyer Laurent Chaniac who was one of the judges. Gewurztraminer can be great but doesn’t go with everything.

Reds can work particularly if they’re lightly chilled but they need to be quite soft without intrusive tannins. Unless you’re a chilli thrillophile you don’t want to ramp up the heat with a load of spicy oak.

Personally I’m dying to see the results. I’ll link to them as soon as they’re published.

I should make clear that I am a senior (paid) judge on What Food What Wine but they haven't asked or commissioned me to write this and the previous post which represent my views and not theirs!