13. April - WINE DINNER: Vietnamese and Thai

On Saturday we did our first actual homemade wine dinner.  Actually, this is just another in a series of dinners that my roommate Jack and I have done over the past couple years; nearly every week, we’ve drawn a culture from a mason jar and we’ve cooked the cuisine of that culture, including well-known beverages from that culture.  Some of our culture nights have included Greek, German, French, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Cajun/New Orleans styled meals.  That being said, we didn’t document any of them, and we had a wide range of different drinks with the foods, but not specifically wines designed to pair with the foods.

However, now that we have a more extensive knowledge of wine and food pairings than we did a few weeks ago, we decided to apply our knowledge to a new meal – this time (loosely) based around Thai and Vietnamese foods. 

Vietnamese Summer Rolls

Chicken Satay

Like I said, Jack and I have been planning out weekly menus all year, and we usually watch Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations or Alton Brown’s Good Eats to get some nice background information on how to prepare these meals and determine the best food/drink combinations.  So with the nice weather, and in the wake of the International Street Fair (which was awesome, by the way), we settled on some fresh Vietnamese and Thai dishes.  Our prospective menu included Chicken Satay with peanut sauce (Thai), crunchy Thai Spring Rolls, Vietnamese Summer Rolls, fried rice with yum yum sauce, and some potstickers.  Additionally, our guests brought brie cheese, goat cheese, crackers, and a delicious chocolate cream cake.  And of course, they brought wine and wine glasses as well.

Everything we made was entirely homemade, and we started the day by going to the farmers market off of Main Street.  There, we bought a mint plant, since Jack’s original mint plant died over the winter.  After that we went to World Market and Super Kroger, stopping at the Vintage Cellar to do the Saturday tasting there (which was a lot of fun).  After that, I set about making a marinade for the Chicken Satay and the peanut sauce, while Jack de-veined and boiled the shrimp, cooked the rice vermicelli noodles, and prepared the other fillings for the spring and summer rolls.  

After we brined and marinated the chicken, we skewered the pieces and made our way down to the grills outside.  While we were grilling, we met a group of kids doing their own food and alcohol pairing: pizza and a power hour, featuring PBR.  We took turns grilling and wrapping the Summer Rolls, which included cucumber, carrots, mung bean sprouts, noodles, shrimp, mint, Thai basil, and cilantro.  The Spring rolls included some of the noodles, carrots, and some pork we fried up in the wok.  Jack had made some pot-stickers the night before, so we fried those as well.  

While we were waiting, we read some of the Zraly Chapters

As our guests arrived, we set to pairing our wines with the food.  We had mostly white wines to go with the theme of spring, and kind of lighter, airier foods. 

Here are the 5 wines that we had with dinner

WINE LIST

ENCOSTAS DO LIMA – Vinho Verde

Denominaçao de Origem Controlada

Region: North Eastern Portugal, Lima

Vintage: 2011

Alc. by Vol: 10%

Varietal: 80% Loureiro, 20% Trajadura

CK MONDAVI – Chardonnay

Region: California

Vintage: 2011

Alc. by Vol: 13.4%

Varietal: Chardonnay

THE NAKED GRAPE – Pinot Grigio

Region: California

Vintage: n/a

Alc. by Vol: n/a

Varietal: Pinot Grigio

MONTE AMAN – Rose

Denominación de Origen

Region: Arlanza, Spain

Vintage/Cosecha: 2011

Alc. by Vol: 13%

Blend: Predominantly Tinta del Pais (Tempranillo) with Albillo and Viura

TOMASELLO WINERY – Red Raspberry Wine

Region: Hammonton, New Jersey

Vintage: n/a

Alc. by Vol: 11%

Varietal: 100% Raspberry

 For dessert we had the raspberry wine along with this chocolate cake.  It was very good, but very rich, so it was best to only eat a little bit.

TASTING NOTES

Vinho Verde:

I thought that this one had nice, light apple flavors on the nose.  It’s a very lightly colored wine, and it had a nice little effervescence.  I thought it had a nice crisp acidity.  I tried this wine with one of the summer rolls we made, and I thought it made the apple flavors a lot sweeter, and it cut some of the acidity, especially when I tried it with the peanut sauce.  After that, I tried the wine with the chicken satay, and I thought that was an excellent pairing; it brought out bright honey and honeysuckle flavors as well as citrus and floral components.  I thought it was way better after trying it with the grilled chicken, it just seemed to soften some of the harsher aspects of the acid.  

Enjoying the wines and food

Chardonnay:

The chardonnay was lightly oaked and had more prominent apple flavors, and though I’m pretty sure it was a dry wine, the apple flavors seemed to almost give it a little bit of sweetness.  The nose had nice fruity components like apple and pear, and I thought I even detected a light citrus element like lemon.  It had a darker color than all the other whites we tried, probably because it spent a little bit of time in oak, more than the others.  I thought the taste was also fruity, and it had a light to medium body.  With brie, I thought the apple flavors became a bit sweeter, and with goat cheese, I thought it brought out more of the nice oak flavors, along with very light granny smith apple tartness.  I felt like the goat cheese (more so than the brie) brought out more of the kinds of flavors associated with Malolactic fermentation; I thought it had a nice, toasty oak element as well as a chestnut taste, and I thought it was much smoother with the goat cheese.  This was one of my favorite combinations.

Trying the Chardonnay on the porch

Pinot Grigio

Nose: Very crisp apple notes, and it seemed semi-sweet.  The texture was very lightly effervescent, and the taste was lightly acidic, with crisp pear and apple and honeyed flavors.  I didn’t think this paired well with anything that we cooked to be honest, I think everything overpowered the wine, it didn’t have particularly strong elements. 

Vinho Verde with the food

Monte Aman Rose

This wine had a weaker nose and I found it a lot harder to pick out the flavors of this wine, but I thought it had a weak cherry aroma.  The cherry taste came through on the palate, but I thought it was definitely a little bit hot, and it also had some weak strawberry flavors as well.  This was my least favorite wine.  I tried this with some goat cheese, and I thought the creamy cheese definitely softened some of the hotness, making it a lot more drinkable.  I still didn’t like it much, though. 

Me and my least favorite wine of the night

Monte Aman with some Goat Cheese

Red Raspberry Wine

This wine was unique in that it was made from 100% raspberries.  But that was very noticeable, I thought the raspberry flavors really game through on both the nose and the palate.  Really strong raspberry jam flavors, and for me, this was far too sweet, though some people really liked it.  We tried it with the chocolate cream cake, and I do think that this would be best with chocolate, however, dark chocolate would probably be best, and this was more of a milk chocolate and cream dessert.  I appreciated it for what it was, but it was too rich of a dessert wine for me. 

Here's the Raspberry wine with the dessert

The whole group enjoying our glass of wine

Overall I thought this was a great time, from start to finish.  We have a few ideas about how we would change recipes for next time, but overall we thought the food came out well. We chose the wines we did with an anticipation for the whites to pair with some of the fresher tastes of summer rolls and the cheeses.  I would have liked to have either a sweet Riesling or a Gewürztraminer in there as well, and next time, I would have also made a spicy dish to go along with those sweeter wines.