Admittedly, wine is not the first beverage most people reach for when pairing with an Indian
meal. The cooling effects of inoffensive ice-cold lager or mango Lassi seem to be the most
popular salves for palates grappling with the extroversion of the Indian table. This mindset of
beverage as salve is perhaps why, when you do see wine pairing recommendations for Indian
food, they tend to focus on wines with residual sugar with suggestions such as off-dry Riesling
or Gewurztraminer. While I am a card-carrying Riesling evangelist, I think the Gewurztraminer
gives us a better frame for thinking about pairing wines with Indian cuisine.
By focusing on factors such as heat, we tend to select wines that aim to suppress elements of
the food, rather than harmonize with or emphasize the flavor elements on the table. Indian
cooking is multilayered. In one dish, in addition to capsaicin spice, you can have smoke,
yoghurt, cardamom, cumin, coriander, clove, fennel, cream, tamarind, cilantro and on and on…
In my opinion, what you need is a wine that weaves in and out of those elements, picking up on
and emphasizing different elements of the dish. We want our wine and our food to occupy the
same conversational space without shouting over one another. We do have one fairly hard
guiding principle here, however.
Heat, alcohol, oak, and tannin are elements that do not mix well. What feels like firmness in
Bordeaux or Barolo can, under the wrong conditions, curdle into bitterness and abrasion, as
though the wine has suddenly remembered an embarrassing email it sent in 2009. So, we
should, in practice, tend toward wines that privilege acidity, fragrance, and non-fruit elements
that can respond to the food.
Take palak paneer, for instance, which is spinach and fresh cheese and gentle spice arranged
into something that feels, in the best possible way, like comfort that has been lightly edited for
elegance. Here I would recommend Heidi Schrock’s “More is More” 2025 ($25 for 1 liter). It is a
white blend from Austria’s Burgenland, composed of Pinot Blanc, Muskateller, and Chardonnay.
It speaks in lime, green apple, with a kind of stony clarity that feels like rinsing your palate. The
spinach finds its echo in the wine’s green register; the paneer is lifted rather than flattened.
Nothing dominates. Everything is allowed to remain itself.
With tandoori chicken, the atmosphere changes. We are now in the realm of smoke and char
and the language of fire. Northern Rhône Syrah is particularly good at this kind of negotiation,
provided one avoids the versions that have been inflated into caricature by excess oak or
alcohol. Vincent Paris’s Syrah IGP Collines Rhodaniennes 2024 ($23) brings black pepper, olive
tapenade, and a kind of savory depth that feels less like fruit and more like memory. It does not
compete with the tandoor; it acknowledges it, almost respectfully.
Then there is lamb rogan josh. It is not loud, exactly, but it is insistent in its depth: Kashmiri chili,
warming spice, long-cooked lamb, a sauce that has had several hours to become itself. Here
Rioja Reserva feels less like a choice and more like a necessity—and a violation of our general
guiding principle to boot. It just works, however. I’d recommend López de Heredia’s Viña
Tondonia Reserva 2013 ($75). Indulgent, but so good. It offers red fruit that has begun to drift
into leather and tobacco, with American oak contributing a faint vanilla sweetness. The tannins,
softened by time, no longer assert themselves so much as participate. The wine does not stand
apart from the dish; it settles into it.
Wine and food, when they work together, do not resolve into a single message so much as
produce a kind of shared intelligibility. The spice becomes more articulate. The wine becomes
more legible. And somewhere in the space between them there is a brief, almost imperceptible
moment in which everything seems to make a little more sense than it strictly should.