Curry fans usually succumb to tinny, burp-making lager or boring, watery jasmine tea, when wine makes a much happier marriage with fiery food than gourmets care to admit. Key ingredients in Indian or Indian-inspired dishes may be fiery and demanding but they are also perfectly wine-friendly.
By contrast, the fizz in lagers whizzes the searingly hot spice in chilli-laden curries round the tongue and soft palate in seconds, while the tannin in jasmine and other teas clashes with highly spiced foods.
If you want to douse the fire in your throat when eating curry, go for a light, high-acid, low-tannin, easy-swigging red wine that takes happily to chilling, or a similarly styled but off-dry pink or white wine. It helps if you skip those highly spiced garlic and chilli-laden pickles and chutneys. The good news is that as most curry ingredients are cheap, budget wines will do fine. Balance is all with the best wine and food marriages.
The big problem with wine and Indian food is that everyone cooks, or orders, a host of dishes and side dishes, making perfect wine matches impossible. Of course purists can avoid this at home by cooking one main dish from Gordon Ramsay’s seductive spicy selection.
After decades of enjoying Indian takeaways at home and eating out, the best one-size-fits-all bottle that I have found is forgiving beaujolais, so dive into the Château Laforêt below. Pink wines are as popular as ever and thankfully the new-era versions are made from flavour-packed grapes grown in decent locations by winemakers who are at long last taking these wines seriously. Traditionalists in search of an Indian lager with flavour and less gas can take their pick from two great beer buys.
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Best wines for Indian food
2008 Château Laforêt, Beaujolais, France Waitrose, £6.99 Delicious, soft, ripe, gamey, plummy, accommodating red beaujolais with wide curry and spicy food appeal. This one is suitable for vegans and vegetarians.
2008 Gran L?pez Rosado, Castillo La Mancha, Spain Waitrose, £4.49 Terrific off-dry pink made from the tempranillo grape and oozing bubblegum-scented fruit. Again vegan and vegetarian-friendly.
Best beer with curry
Kingfisher Premium 4.8 per cent 660ml bottle Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, £1.98; Tesco, £2.02 Kingfisher, brewed under licence in the UK, is the biggest-selling beer in India, so if you want an authentic, yeasty, malty, fuller-flavoured lager, this is for you.
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Cobra Premium, 5 per cent 4x330ml bottles Tesco £3.64; Sainsbury’s, £3.67 Cobra, originally brewed in India, is now brewed in the UK. It is less gassy and so is more suited to spicy food. Worth seeking out for its hoppy scent and gentle barley malt flavour.