Albarino at Tabla
www.tablany.com
Pairing should be a liberating and adventurous experience, rather than confined by rules of yesterday. Until you’ve tried it, you really can’t say yay or nay. I happen to love dark black coffee with cheese, older champagne with my steak, Shiraz with hummus, and the list goes on. So, the invitation to try two Albarinos with Indian food, from appetizer to dessert, was completely up my alley.
At the Bread Bar of Tabla, I was presented with two Albariños, both from the 2006 vintage: Valmiñor and Fulget. I have to be honest; I had an immediate and strong liking for Valmiñor, and it was definitely the better food-pairing wine. It’s as interesting to discover really compatible matches as it is to discover the ones you’d avert even your enemies from, so here‘s my hit and miss list from the night, leaving out the just so-so pairings:
Hits:
Eggplant Bharta with Valmiñor—Eggplant always seems very tricky to have with wine since it already has a bit of tannin, which throws things off a bit. So I didn’t have high hopes, especially since the preparation included Tandoori smoking. That means the wine has to have a bit of weight to hold up to the smokiness. But I was very proud of the structured Valmiñor, which held up to the smokiness and strong flavor of ginger and chilies. The mineral notes of this Albarino cut through the eggplant and spice effortlessly. A pretty pair.
Sea Scallop Ceviche with Fulget— I had preconceived notions that marinated sea scallops would be difficult to pair due to the acidity. But something interesting happened here. As the night wore on and the temperature of the Fulget had risen a bit, the wine kept evolving. As the ceviche dish came mid-meal, so when I tasted it with the Fulget, the wine was fuller and rounder with riper citrus notes. This wine comes from 15-year-old vines, which was harder to detect when it was chilled. An unexpected pair that worked.
Misses:
We continued drinking the wines with our dessert plate of cookies. Here, I will use one of my favorite pairing analogies, likening each pair to a relationship.
Lemon-butter: There was no tangible relationship with the wine. It’s like two people walking past each other.
Cinnamon: When one is too dominant over the other, like the cinnamon in this pairing, it always makes for a bad relationship.
Chocolate coffee: A solid relationship radiates compatibility when the give-and-take is mutual. Here, the minerally Valmiñor and the strong choco-coffee flavors played well together. Seamless. The only winner in the dessert pairings.
I left Tabla with some new pairing discoveries that knocked down my preconceived notions once again. I would love to try Albarino with Lebanese or Turkish next!
Byline: Cynthia Sin-Yi Cheng is the founder of cyn-et-vin, a boutique firm specializing in champagne tastings. Her works have appeared in Condé Nast Portfolio.com, Town&Country Wedding and New York Post’s Page Six Magazine.
She is also the wine editor of Cravings - www.findyourcraving.com.
