Indian food has been considered notoriously difficult to pair with wine, but we at the Wine Pair Podcast say pshaw to that! In this episode, we pair three wines with Indian food and discover that they work together pretty darn well! We cover what to look for in wines to pair with Indian food - hint, think about acidity, oak, and alcohol content - and we also discuss a little bit about why there may be this perception that Indian food is hard to pair with wine and how wine production is increasing in India. We pair wine with Butter Chicken, Tandoori Chicken Tikka, Dal Maharani, Garlic Naan, and Vegetable Samosas, food we ordered from Cedars restaurant in Seattle. Wines reviewed in this episode: 2021 Cottesbrook Gewurztraminer, 2020 San Gregorio Rosado, and 2018 Milton Park Shiraz.
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Episode Transcript and Show Notes
Episode 27: Wines to drink at an Indian Restaurant (Pairing wine and Indian food) 00:00
Hello! And welcome to the Wine Pair podcast. I’m Joe, your sommelier for reasonably priced wine, and this is my wife and wine-pairing partner in crime - Carmela. And we are the Wine Pair.
Ok, this week, Carmela, we are returning to our restaurant series. In this series we plan to talk about wines that you either may find at restaurants that you are not familiar with, or talk about pairing wine and food in a restaurant where you might not know exactly what the right pairing may be. We did one a bit ago where we tried some Greek wines - wines that we really knew very very little about - and we paired them with some Greek foods, and that was really fun and edumacational. What did you think?
So, we want to go back to this series, and this episode we are going to talk about wines that you either might find at an Indian restaurant, or that should pair well with Indian food. Super fun, right?
Now, we love Indian food - don’t we? and we are blessed in the Seattle area to have a lot of Indian restaurants. I will not say that I am an Indian food expert by any means, but I do know that I really like Indian food, and, when I eat just about any food, I like to figure out what wine will go with it.
You may not know this, Carmela, but Indian food is sort of known as a cuisine that is difficult to pair with wine. Why do you think that might be?
- In many cases, it is because the food can be spicy, but you can easily find wines that can be paired with spicy foods.
- I think it may be more because there is not a lot of wine made in India, and because of colonialism, India has had a tradition of making beer, which was a more British aligned beverage. And, beer does go well with spiced cuisine like Indian food.
But I kind of think it’s something different, and we can debate this, and I would love to hear what others who are listening think. In most cultures where you have food and wine that are thought of as going together - or where food and wine pairing is considered some sort of art or religion - like in Italy or France or Spain, etc. these are generally from regions where there is a lot of wine production around the food. So, is that chicken or is it egg?
In other words, is Indian food not traditionally paired with wine because there is not a lot of wine production in India, or because it is difficult to pair? Some people say it’s because it’s difficult to pair, but we are going to try to find that out!!!
Yes, so today we have three wines that we think should pair well with Indian food after doing some research on the interwebs - and you asked me earlier if I came up with the pairings or if I researched them.
I think that is a fair question, and it’s a little bit of both because I do try and think about what flavors in the food might pair well with the wine, but what is interesting today is that we have some wines here that I don’t think either of us are super familiar with, so this will be a really interesting show - at least for us! Today we have: a Shiraz or Syrah, a Gewurztraminer, and a rose’ from Spain made from Spanish grapes that are traditionally thought of as red wine grapes. What’s also fun forus is that these wines are not wines we have done episodes on yet, so I am looking forward to that.
And, we’ll go into why we chose those wines in a minute, but first . . .
. . . we have to do our shameless plug and explain why we are tasting three wines. So, each week on our podcast we usually taste and review three reasonably priced wines - that means under $20 - that should be easy for you to find. I say usually because in the upcoming weeks we are going to be doing some episodes that are really interesting and exciting. In our next episode we will be interviewing the women from The Swirl Suite podcast - four African American women who are trying to elevate black voices in wine - they are just wonderful people aren’t they? And we will also be interviewing some wine makers, including some women wine makers - specifically we have Tabitha Compton on the books who runs Compton Family wines in Oregon with her husband, and that will be a chance to talk about women in the wine industry. So lots of fun and exciting things coming up, and so we think you should subscribe so you don’t miss any of them!
And we would love you to leave us a rating and review as well if you like what you are hearing, and to send us some feedback on what you like and what you maybe don’t like, and also things you would like us to do on the podcast. You can DM us on Instagram at thewinepairpodcast or on our website at thewinepairpodcast.com if you have any feedback or ideas or want to collaborate or be a guest. Just let us know. And tell everyone about us, including your cousin’s spouse that you really like. How about that for a random?
Topic: Wine production in India 08:10
Ok, but let’s get back to it. At this point in most every episode we take a bit of a left turn to talk about something maybe only tangentially related to the topic of the day, but this week, I think we are going to stick a little closer to the topic, just because there are some really interesting things here that we are learning about Indian food and wine and wine production in India, and we think those of you out there in listening land may want to know, too.
So, Carmela, for the second week in a row, we are going full former-teacher mode (something we mentioned in our last episode) and it is teacher appreciation month or week or day or something - and we are sticking with going full lifetime learners mode on you all. We are in FULL NERD MODE!!! We are going to drop some MAJOR knowledge. And every time we drop something big, we might just have to shout out Boom or something.
I also think someday we should just do an episode on being teachers. That would be interesting! What do you think?
Now, as I was doing some research for this episode on the interwebs, I was really curious to find out if there is much wine production in India because you just don’t hear a lot about wine from India, right? What do you think, Carmela? I mean, India is a huge country - not just in population, but in size. (It is the 7th largest country by landmass, and the 2nd largest by population) - nerd out!
https://www.worldometers.info/geography/largest-countries-in-the-world/
India is a huge country with a wide variety of cuisines cultures, and even climates, but it does tend to be pretty hot in much of the country especially in summer, and it also tends to get very heavy rains during monsoon season, which occurs during the key summer growing season, and so these are not super awesome things to have when trying to grow wine as a crop.
https://weatherspark.com/countries/IN
So, given that, any ideas on where you might be able grow wine in India?
- To counteract some of the impacts of heat and rain, wines that are grown in India tend to be grown at higher altitudes, and in places where there is some protection from the elements, like on slopes and hillsides.
Which is not all that different from how grapes are often planted in other more traditional growing regions which have hot weather or hot summers like Italy and Spain and Argentina and Portugal and Australia. Alright, are you learning something?!?
India has been increasing its wine production, but it is still not very large. I don’t pretend to be an expert in this area at all, but I do know that there are cultural and religious reasons that have very likely influenced wine production as well. Several of the largest religions found in India either do not allow alcohol or do not encourage alcohol consumption, and so this would obviously have an impact on not just wine production, but how or even if wine should be paired with Indian food. I have some links in our show notes about that.
I think it is important to remember again that food and wine are very closely matched in cultures, and that while wine is consumed as a recreational beverage by a lot of us in the US and other parts of the world, its core function, at least from my perspective, is as a food and as a complement to food that we eat. Do you agree?!? It’s really meant to be consumed with food! And, to that, part of the reason for me wanting to do this episode and this series of episodes is to explore how foods and wines not just go together, but also how cuisines of certain regions are linked to wine - like in Italy, France, Spain, etc.
One of the reasons, then, why wine production is not big in India is because wine consumption is quite small.
- Can you guess how much wine is consumed on average in India?
- Maybe that is a catch-22, but according to the wikis pedia, wine consumption in India is less than an ounce per person per year!
Can you guess how that compares to the countries where a lot of wine is consumed? What are the three countries where they drink the most wine per person?
- Compare that to Portugal, Italy, and Spain which consume between 1,500 and 1,700 ounces per person per year. That’s a huge difference! That is not to say that people in India are completely teetotalers. The same article does claim that 98% of alcohol consumed in India is beer or hard alcohol, whereas wine is about 2%.
Just note, too, that we will have links to these and other articles in our show notes if you visit our website at thewinepair.com. So you can NERD OUT, too!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_wine
https://www.bkwine.com/features/more/wine-consumption-per-person-2020/
Evidently, in the 1980s and 1990s in India, the wine industry started to ramp up, and some of that is likely tied to improvements in the economic status - as many people in India started to increase their incomes, in part because of of the explosion of engineering and technology education in India, the country started to become more financially successful. Wine tends to be a more expensive drink, or at least has some cache when people start making some money as a bit of a status symbol. Wine is increasing in production, and while there are several areas where wine is being produced, according to Wikipedia, “the city of Nashik in the state of Maharashtra is called the "Wine Capital of India."
And, while there are not a lot of areas where wine grapes will do super well in India, evidently wine is produced in the far north like in places like Punjab and Kashmir, in the central part of India like Maharashtra, and even in the south in the Tamil Nadu region.
In terms of viticulture (that’s a ten cent nerdy wine word for the grapes that are grown and then made into wine), a lot of the wines grown in India now are imported grape varieties, like Sauvignon blanc, Zinfandel, Chenin blanc. These grow well in many of the climates in India where it is warmer. In addition, there are several indigenous Indian grape varieties that are grown there, and this is super fun to learn about, because I have never heard of them, but they include grapes like Anabeshahi, Arkavati and Arkashyam.
There are also non-native varieties that have established themselves and been given their own native names (this is similar to how Zinfandel is known as Primitivo in Italy), and a couple of these are called the Bangalore Blue and the Gulabi. But, evidently a grape from Turkey called Sultana is the most widely grown grape in India, which is known in the US as the Thompson Seedless grape and is mostly eaten here as a table grape, but in India and Turkey, it is made into a dry or semi-dry wine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(grape)
Choosing wines to pair with Indian food, and the food we are tasting in this episode 15:03
So, this is a good segue into the wines we have chosen for this episode and why. I would have loved to find some wines from India to use in this episode, but that is currently super hard to do. So, we did the next best thing and found wines that some experts say are good to pair. Again, information is in our show notes.
As we mentioned earlier, Indian food is considered notoriously difficult to pair with wine mostly because it is so highly spiced, Which is also part of why the food is so wonderful and beautiful. And when we say spiced, we are not just talking about hot spices, which can be found in some Indian foods, but also just the variety of spices and the very aromatic spices that are often used.
We are talking about spices like cardamom, cloves, cassia bark (which is very much like cinnamon), black pepper, cumin, coriander, nutmeg, mustard seed, fenugreek (which is the key spice in Madras curry, used in the famous butter chicken that we LOVE), turmeric, saffron, cayenne, fennel, red chili power. Many of these are mixed together into different masalas.
https://www.thekitchn.com/11-essential-spices-for-indian-cooking-223152
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/india/articles/indias-most-common-and-flavorful-spices/
I should also note that It is not quite fair to say “Indian food” because there is such a variety of styles in India. But, for sake of making this relatively easy, we will focus on the foods we usually find in American Indian restaurants, which I am sure have some traditional qualities, but, like all imported cuisines, also have some Americanizing to them. There are tons and tons of awesome dishes, but there are a few that are popular and that we are having tonight
- We ordered from a local restaurant called Cedars @cedardsseattle,, https://cedarsseattle.com/
- We ordered butter chicken, Tandoori Chicken Tikka, Dal Maharani (rich and creamy lentil based curry made from black urad dal and kidney beans), Garlic Naan, Vegetable Samosa (pastries full of vegetables and potatoes and love)
Now, sometimes, when there is a lot going on in a food, which is one of the amazing qualities of Indian food, which is why choosing a wine can be tricky. But, here are a couple of rules of thumb you can use when choosing wines.
- Spicy foods - any thoughts?
- Light, fruity, and acidic wines tend to do well with spicy foods, and can also hold up to creamy sauces or side dishes - think currys, butter chicken, daals and channa (vegetarian dishes with lentils or chickpeas). That means wines like Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, or Pinot Grigio. This includes with red meats like lamb, which sounds counterintuitive.
- Semi-sweet or semi-dry wines can also go well with spicier foods. Semi-sweet wines would be like a semi-dry riesling, like a Spätlese, or even a semi-dry or dry prosecco (remember, in sparking wine world, dry means sweet).
- Red wines - what do you think?
- Raj Parr, who is one of my favorite wine makers and is from India, says that red wines are really hard to pair with Indian food, and that if they are, they should be spicier reds that are not too fruit forward or too oaky. He suggests syrah and cabernet franc are good pairings, and that even Pinot Noir, which is Parr’s specialty, is not a good combo. Syrah and cabernet franc would be great with tandoori chicken, tikka kebabs, or naan.
- By the way, as a side brag, I just got my latest shipment of Domaine de la Cote wines which Raj Parr makes and are really hard to find! His aim is to make Pinot Noir in the US that is similar to wine in Burgundy France!
- What do you think about alcohol content?
- Raj Parr also suggests we pay attention to alcohol content rather than sugar. Lower alcohol is better with spicier foods.
- What about a rose’?
- Raj Parr also says that “Rosé works really well,” and so do Chenin Blancs or even spicy Gamays. He also says that orange wines - which are wines that stay on the skins for a few days rather than for just a day or less with rose’s - can be really good
https://vinepair.com/articles/indian-food-wine-pairing-guide/
So, for tonight, what we have chosen are some wines from those genres, if you will:
- Our red is A shiraz or a syrah. Some wine experts think spicier versions from Southern Australia are good choices, so that is what we are trying today
- Our spicy food white is A Gewurztraminer. We have a dry version, but a semi-dry is supposed to be a great complement as well
- And our rose’, we chose a rose’ from Spain, so something a little spicier probably, made from Grenache and Tempranillo
Ok, enough with this jibber jabber - let’s get to it!
Other articles
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/14/dining/indian-food-wine-pairings.html
https://www.vogue.in/culture-and-living/content/best-indian-wines-you-need-to-stock-up-on-this-year
Wines and Ratings to pair with Indian Food 21:22
Wine: Cottesbrook Gewurztraminer
Region: New Zealand, Canterbury
Producer: Cottesbrook
Year: 2021
Price: $14.99
Retailer: Total Wine
Alcohol: 13.5%
Grapes: Gewurztraminer
What we tasted and smelled: Flowers, roses, tropical fruit, apple, gasoline, tart, spicy, spiced cider, applesauce with some cinnamon. Rich. Dry, with some sweetness.
Food pairing with: Butter chicken. Great with Indian food
Rating:
- Joe: 7
- Carmela: 8
Wine: San Gregorio Rosado
Region: Spain, Calatayud
Producer: San Gregorio
Year: 2020
Price: $11.99
Retailer: Total Wine
Alcohol: 14.1%
Grapes: 70% Granacha and 30% Tempranillo
What we tasted and smelled: Strawberry, strawberry frosted Pop Tart, sweet fruit, toast, watermelon, syrupy. A bit of a bitter aftertaste. Flat. Almost like a flat sparkling wine.
Food pairing with: Not as good with the food, but would be a good standalone wine. Handled the chicken tikka well.
Rating:
- Joe: 5
- Carmela: 6
Wine: Milton Park Shiraz
Region: South Australia, Barossa
Producer: Milton Park
Year: 2018
Price: $14.99
Retailer: Total Wine
Alcohol: 14.5%
Grapes: Syrah
What we tasted and smelled: Spicy, pepper, black cherry, leather, rich, rose, tar, tobacco, plum, smooth. Good acidity.
Food pairing with: Butter chicken, samosa, great paired with the Indian food.
Rating:
- Joe: 8
- Carmela: 7
Which one of these are you finishing tonight?
- Carmela: Gewurztraminer
- Joe: Shiraz
Taste profiles expected from a New Zealand Gewurztraminer, Grenache and Tempranillo Rose’ or Rosado, and Southern Autstralia Shiraz: 39:25
- Gewurztraminer
- Lychee (Some say it tastes like a cross between a strawberry and a watermelon, while others taste a blend of citrus and rose water or other floral note)
- Rose, grapefruit, tangerine (orange with more tang), ginger
- Medium-ish body, sweet, higher in alcohol, low in tannin and acidity
- Apricot, tropical fruits, pepper and sweet spices, dried fruits, honey
- Grenache and Tempranillo Rose
- A grenache rose’ will have flavors of ripe strawberry, orange, hibiscus and sometimes with a hint of allspice. Perfumy. Berries.
- A tempranillo rose’ will have flavors of herbs, green peppercorn, watermelon, strawberry, and meaty notes reminiscent of fried chicken
- When together, they can have flower notes
- Shiraz (from South Australia)
- Blackberry sauce, fruit cake, sassafras (citrus, vanilla, licorice - think root beer), camphor (assuming they mean edible camphor, which is sweet and spicy - often put into candy), sweet tobacco
- Traditional tastes like blueberry, plum, milk chocolate, tobacco, peppercorn
Outro and how to find us 41:43
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