Top pairings | Wine and Indonesian food: which wine pairs best with Rijsttafel?

Top pairings

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

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Comments: 1 (Add)

Nayoung on June 8 2014 at 15:50

Dear Fiona,

This was just the article I was looking for! I'm getting married in Bali this year and I need to choose a white and red wine. We'll have a rijsttafel dinner. Our caterer is giving us the following brands to choose from, from these brands would you have any recommendations in particular? Jacob's Creek, Hardy's, Lindemans and G7. Thank you! Nayoung

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