What wine do you drink with spicy food?

Yum Nue and Tom Yum Kai! My favorites! The soup is hot and sour with chicken and vegetables… the salad is broiled skirt steak marinated after cooking in chili-garlic paste, nam pla (fish sauce), rice wine vinegar, lime juice and chopped coriander. I like to marinate the thinly sliced onions too…. So, tasty.

Not a traditional wine kind of dinner though. In college we ate these kinds of dinners with beer. Then again, we ate a lot of things with beer…

This time we tried pairing our Thai feast with fruity wines. One, a Liebfraumilch from the Sycamore Winery. It was drier than the Blue Nun of my childhood and contained fewer bizarre mental images (Why did they put that nun on a bike? I never did understand that…oh, and as an extra note, when did it STOP being a liebfraumilch?). It didn’t fight the food and actually added a nice balance. Our second choice (as we were feeling particularly mellow after such a satisfying home cooked meal) was a wine from the Savoie region of France (near the border with Italy) called Apremont which was produced by Pierre Boniface. It was also fruity, smelling of melons and pears which was perfect with the sharp curried flavor of the soup. I picked up this bottle at the Wine Discount Center for about $7.00 (if memory serves)

Kevin and I were satisfied with our choices, but would love to hear what You (there are people out there reading these things, right?) would choose to drink with this kind of meal. I won’t cook it for you… but I might just share my recipes…. Just ask!

Tags: Sycamore Winery

This entry was posted on November 19, 2007 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Apremont, Blue Nun, Cooking at Home, Liebfraumilch, Spicy Food, Wine Discount Center. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.