Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [69]
Fusion, in this case, consisted of sweet-and-sour Wiener schnitzel with risotto, and when he asked what wine they recommended with the dish, the waiter replied, “Beer. Molson. Lots.”
Indeed, the task would have been difficult to perform otherwise. A BBC radio producer was celebrated for his ability to construct satirical menus for special occasions, his chef d’oeuvre possibly being “vibrating skate wings lightly dusted with Ajax and served in a helmet,” but reality has overtaken him: what would you choose to accompany a dish of udders cooked in hay, which we ate at one of the most celebrated restaurants in Britain?
But of all the challenges of food-and-wine pairings, the most insurmountable must surely be curry. Given that both the generic balti and chicken tikka masala have acquired the status of Britain’s national dishes, the marketing of wines to accompany curry has become a fierce and valuable contest. Curry traditionally has been drunk with beer ever since the British Raj in the nineteenth century, when so-called India pale ales were brewed specifically to endure the four-thousand-mile voyage to India (you will still see IPA as a category on beer-pump handles in the pub).
The problem is compounded by the lack of any tradition of drinking with food in Indian culture: drinking, at least of alcohol, stops when eating starts, and food is usually accompanied by lassi, a sweet or salty drink made from yogurt—far better at taking the edge off a very hot curry, since only fat (as in yogurt) or sugar is effective at blunting the fire of the capsaicin in chiles.
One enterprising company, Balti Wine, was set up in 2007 specifically to crack this potential treasure chest with five wines, which they offer in various bottle-top colors to go with varying spiciness of food, “the product of extensive taste testing in conjunction with representatives from the Food Technology Department at Manchester University.” Blended from Argentinian wines, they include Blue Top Sauvignon-Chardonnay for Mild Cuisine, Orange Top Chenin-Chardonnay for Medium Hot Cuisine, and Green Top Ugni Blanc–Chardonnay for the Hottest Cuisine, the last being described by wine writer Andrew Fraser as “quite unpleasant to drink on its own” but “transformed” with a lamb Karachi curry. Fraser ruefully concludes: “I certainly wish I’d thought of the idea.”
Does the glass you use make any difference?
THIS IS A MATTER of some contention. There are several glass-makers who produce a series of glasses with different shapes for each type of wine; they insist that it makes a substantial difference in your tasting experience if you use a glass of a specific shape for claret, burgundy, chardonnay, riesling, or a dozen others. Many question this notion, saying that it is more of a marketing ploy than an absolute truth. There have been tastings in which glasses were marked against each other, but the results do not reliably point one way or another. In the circumstances, one might as well be guided by aesthetics and cost as by function.
Professionals at least can agree on the decision of the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to prescribe a standard tasting glass. This is used by tasters in wine competitions and also by examining bodies in wine-tasting examinations. The glass has a volume of 210 ml, but for tasting, only 50 ml of wine is put into it. The glass curves