Wine and Dinner Pairing April 21st, 2013

Me and four friends decided to have a wine and Indian food night. It was delicious!! We started off the night with two of us cooking and the rest of us sitting around drinking some nice Merlot and eating chocolate. Despite the bottle of Merlot being just a cheap bottle we happened to pick up at Kroger, it was delicious with every chocolate we ate. You can see how much fun me and Molly are having just watching Azure and Ashlynn do all the work while we enjoy the fruits of their cooking labors....

Then after Ashlynn and Azure finished cooking the Indian food (because let's face it, if I had gotten in on the cooking the food would have been ruined), we popped open a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, and put our plates together. I, unfortunately couldn't sample all of the food because one of the sauces had coconut in it, which I'm alergic to, but what I had was fantastic. 

Here we are settling down with our wine:

Here we are with our plates full of deliciousness:

My meal consisted of a bit of white rice, some naan bread, and a chicken and chick pea curry drizzled over the rice. I liked this meal paired specifically with this wine because it added to the spicyness of the curry. Don't get me wrong, the curry was plenty spicy on its own, but the wine gave it even more of a zing and kick. 

However, I did find that after I was done eating the curry and naan bread, the wine didn't hold as much appeal to me. I had to throw a couple of strawberries into the wine to make it appeal to my pallet. That might have had to do with the way the spices from the Indian food affected my taste buds and left a residual film in my mouth, so I needed the sweetness that came from the strawberries in the wine to counter it. 

I had a fantastic time pairing these wines with our meal. Overall, I think we made fantastic choices in how the Merlot we started with amped up the chocolate appetizer (for some of us), and how the Sauvignon Blancs we chose to have with the main course of Indian curry really set off the spicy flavoring. I did not like the way the wine tasted after the food was gone, but the strawberries straightened that right out :)

Loved this dinner event, especially since I didn't have to do the cooking!!!

~Heather