Do You Want To Make The Experience Of Eating Chicken Vindaloo Even Better? Here’s How You Can.

Like we always do here at PairCraft, we went on a mission to find out if and how we could transform this dish into one that creates even more pleasure. We rounded up all of the best ideas and most popular recommendations for wines to pair with the dish, and we added a few more promising ideas. Then we had a sommelier with a great pairing palate and tons of experience evaluating food and wine pairings blind taste test all of these ideas and recommendations with a plate of chicken vindaloo. In this case, we tasted 37 wines to see what they added to the experience of eating the dish and to see which ones, if any, made the overall experience of eating this dish even better.

For this pairing study, our sommelier was Michael Dolinski. Michael is a deep, analytical, and advanced thinker and practitioner when it comes to food and wine pairing. Like all the sommeliers we work with, he has a great palate and very high standards for evaluating pairing results.

We used the Chicken Vindaloo recipe from Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street for the dish in our taste testing. If your recipe is similar, you should get the same pairing results that we did.

The best pairings. Here is what we found:

You can make the experience of eating this dish even better by pairing it with:

Joseph Faiveley 2019 Bourgogne Pinot Noir (SRP $30) or with a wine that has the same pairing characteristics. This wine builds a better composition by adding a refreshing liveliness and by adding a bright cherry taste that we discovered is delicious with this dish.

What’s this experience Like?

When you eat a bite of the chicken vindaloo, you get this initial sense that it’s a comforting stew or braise. But then, almost immediately after that, you get the taste of the wonderful spices and bright acidity that chicken vindaloo is known for. When you take a sip of this wine after a bite of the food, the wine brings a level of acidity that’s bigger and brighter than the acidity in the dish. This contrast in levels of acidity is interesting and pleasing. Also, the wine brings a nice, bright Bing cherry flavor to the experience, which is pleasing here because this cherry is a flavor that is just really great with the flavors in the dish.

Here’s a second way you can make it better.

Another way you can turn this dish into an even better overall composition is by pairing it with:

Domaine des Deux nes “Premiers Pas” Corbières 2019 (SRP $15) or with a wine that has the same pairing characteristics. This wine builds a better composition by adding a brighter acidity, a pleasing contrast in weight, and by adding dark cherry and dark plum flavors, again, flavors we discovered are very pleasing with this dish.

What is the experience like?

When you take a sip of this wine after eating a bite of the food, you get the same nice, bigger and brighter acidity that you get with the Burgundy (the Bourgogne), and that is pleasing, but this wine brings the feeling of a richer and weightier wine. The weight of the wine creates pleasure here because it is heavier than the dish, and this contrast in weight is one of the ways a pairing can create pleasure. It’s interesting that the wine feels weightier after a bite of the food than it does on its own. This is a great example of how the wine changes when it encounters the food residual (we describe the food residual and why it matters in the “…big, new insight..” section below. The wine also brings dark cherry and dark plum flavors to the palate, and these flavors pair seamlessly and deliciously with the flavors of the vindaloo.

Here’s a third way.

You can turn this dish into an even better overall composition by pairing it with:

Lapalu Beaujolais-Villages 2019 (SRP $24) or with a wine that has the same pairing characteristics. This wine brings almost the same experience as the Bourgogne rouge, but it gets there another way—with gamay not pinot noir.

What is the experience like?

When you take a sip of this wine after eating a bite of the dish, you get almost the same experience you get with the Burgundy, but you get there with a different grape—in this case, gamay. The welcome cherry flavors that this wine adds are just a bit darker but still every bit as delicious with the dish.

Michael was surprised and excited about what this pairing added to the experience of eating this dish and said that he thought this pairing was much better than all the traditional and classic Beaujolais pairings he’s tasted.

And here’s a fourth way.

You can turn this dish into an even better overall composition by pairing it with:

Später-Veit Feinherb Riesling 2019 (SRP $17) or with a wine that has the same pairing characteristics. Here, you get the pleasure of the bigger and brighter acidity and the pleasing addition of white peach flavor, another flavor that we found is delicious with this dish.

What is the experience like?

When you take a sip of this wine after a bite of the dish, you get the pleasure created by the bigger and brighter acidity. Here, the wine adds a beautiful white peach flavor. This is another flavor that we found is a very welcome addition to the flavors in the dish.

Did we break any new ground here? Yes, we did.

  • It is commonly thought that this is a white wine dish but, we think it is really a red wine dish.
  • We found that red stone fruit flavors are great additions to the experience of eating this dish. Ranging from bright red cherry to dark cherry and dark plum, these flavors, with the flavors in the vindaloo, are great examples of flavor combinations that just work.
  • People often recommend riesling for Indian food (specifically an off-dry or sweet one) because, the thinking goes, you want to stop the heat, and the sugar in the wine will stop the heat. We found that the right type of riesling can stop the heat, but it can also add flavors that turn eating this dish into a better overall experience.
  • And we found that higher alcohol red wines can work with this dish. People tend to stay away from higher alcohol red wines with this dish because the higher alcohol can dial up the heat of the dish. A higher alcohol, dry red wine might increase the heat a bit, but we found that if the wine has sweet fruit flavors (sweet fruit flavors, but not sugar–we’re talking about dry wines here), these flavors keep the heat from being elevated. You can mitigate the heat with sugar or with sweet fruit flavors.

Selection of The best pairings

Find out more
Perfect Pairing

Beaujolais-Village, Lapalu 2019

(SRP $23.96)
Pairing Idea: Super fruity, light to medium bodied red wine
Pairing Results: I love this pairing. It's gorgeous. You get this wonderful herbal note, bits of rosemary. The wine picks up cilantro right away and lifts the savory notes in the vindaloo. That's delicious. I really thought this was going to be a white wine dish, but that's a great pairing. You have to keep the tannin down in the wine, the tannin is really low here. You have a wonderful bright Bing cherry taste and leafiness in the pairing result and that's delicious.
Perfect Pairing

Corbieres “Premiers Pas”, Domaine des Deux Anes 2019

(SRP $14.99)
Pairing Idea: Super fruity, light to medium bodied red wine
Pairing Results: This is fun. This is really good. The wine had wonderful red meat quality against the dish which is interesting--this is turning out to be more of a red wine dish. I would have anticipated a white wine. There's just enough acid that it stays fruit, but there's a softness. Because of its viscosity, it just softens the spice a bit but doesn't throw it out of balance. Indian spices are just not about the level of heat but balance of the multitude of ingredients. You need a wine that accentuates all the elements or you upset the apple cart, not an apple cart on one wheel or two but 12.
Perfect Pairing

Joseph Faiveley Bourgogne Pinot Noir 2019

(SRP $29.99)
Pairing Idea: This specific wine
Pairing Results: This is good. Enough sweetness right through the middle, enough acid to make sure the ripeness stays put. The wine stays sweet, fruit-driven, fresh, and the spice comes back at the end, almost like it cut the spice down, even though there is no residual sugar. I want to go in for another sip and another bite. It's great.
Perfect Pairing

Riesling Feinherb, Spater-Velt (Mosel) 2019

(SRP $16.99)
Pairing Idea: Medium-dry riesling
Pairing Results: The RS (residual sugar) is right. It works. It's not my favorite, but if you want to kill the spice off a little bit, this does it without throwing off the balance. The wine doesn't come off as sugary. Even with the spice, it comes off as balanced. I like that. Of the white wine pairings, this is one of my favorites.

Next Dish

Steamed Whole Fish with Ginger, Scallions, and Soy

About PairCraft, our process, and our thoughts and beliefs about pairing.

What we do
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We test the recommendations that serious home cooks and wine-savvy people are likely to receive if they ask the sources that they typically ask for pairing advice. We collect these pairing suggestions by doing what these folks typically do. They ask their local or favorite wine store; they ask restaurant wine staff and sommeliers; they ask their wine-smart friend or partner; they look in food and wine-pairing books; they ask themselves (if they have a sense for what the common wisdom is); they consult magazines; and they search the Internet.

We strive to get test results that will be the ideal indicator of the taste experience most people will have. To do this, we find a sommelier who has the education and experience for discerning top food and wine pairings and a palate trained for determining them. In many cases these sommeliers have been recommended to us by other sommeliers because of their taste and experience in food and wine pairing. Since we want our testing to be as objective as possible, we blind taste all of the pairings.

We choose specific recipes to use as the foundations for all of our taste-test sessions, because what’s in the dishes and what the dishes taste like matters. We select recipes we think serious and discerning home cooks would use. As long as the dish you make is similar to the one our recipe produces, the results we share should hold up.

For our process, we round up wines to test the pairing ideas we find; we select a chef to prepare the dish; and we have our sommelier sit down at our tasting table to taste and evaluate all the pairings. All our ratings come out of actual tasting sessions with the dish. They do not come from theories, guesses, logic, mental math, what we think will work, what we think should work, what the rules say works, or the prevailing or long-held wisdom. We eat a bite of the food, we take a sip of the wine, and then we evaluate the pairing result.

We put more emphasis on pairing characteristics than we do on a specific wine
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It’s not really that a specific bottle of wine alone creates the pairing result. If you look more deeply, it’s actually the chemical composition of the wine—what’s in it and how much is in it. Just like with a sauce, a spice, or an herb blend, it’s the composition or makeup of that wine that creates the pairing result with a dish.

If you want to create the experience we report on here, you don’t necessarily need the specific wine we tested—maybe you can’t find the wine we tested or maybe you want to buy a wine at a different price point.  What you need is a wine that has the same or a very similar chemical composition as the one we tested. That wine’s pairing characteristics, which we show for every wine we test, and they are an indication of the composition of that wine.

There is one big, new insight that makes all the difference here
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We’ve found that, typically, people come up with food and wine pairing ideas by thinking about the dish and coming up with a mental list of wines that will taste great with it, or by thinking about which wines are widely thought to be great with a dish, or by figuring out which wines are the classic pairings with that dish, or by using the tried-and-true rules. What we’ve learned through all of our testing is that when you actually taste test these ideas with the dish, in most, if not all cases, you do not actually get the pairing result you think you will get. This is a big, big finding, and you see proof of it in the pairing results of all the wines we taste with a dish.

In most cases, the pairing result you get will be different from what you expect or hope for. Why? Because the wine is not static in the presence of the food. Or put another way, the wine, or maybe we should say the taste of the wine, changes when you take a sip of it after you’ve eaten a bite of the food. And why or how does this happen? Well, when you eat a bite of food, the food leaves a little bit of food and flavor compounds in your mouth. That’s why you have an aftertaste sometimes after you eat a bite of food. We call this bit of food and flavor compounds “the food residual”. Now, the alcohol in wine, ethyl alcohol, is a very good solvent, so it solubilizes this food residual and brings it into solution with the wine.

Now, you have a mixture of the wine and the food residual. This mixture is a new composition—it’s not the original wine anymore. And this new composition, of course, has a new taste. Finally, this new taste is not simply a matter of 1+1=2. What you get is not what you expect—in fact, you don’t know what you’ll get until you taste that food residual and that wine together. The taste you get is a characteristic of that dish and of that wine and wines that have the same pairing characteristics as that wine.

We’ve found that you simply cannot accurately predict the taste outcome of a pairing. Some aspects of the wine might be accentuated—say acidity. Some aspects might disappear—say the fruit flavors of a wine. Sometimes new flavors or sensations are created. We have found again and again that you don’t know what pairing result you will get unless—or until—you take a sip of the wine after you eat a bite of the food. That’s why we do what we do. We taste lots of wines with a dish and report to you what taste that pairing creates and whether it is good or not.

What standard do we use in evaluating pairings?
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The type of pairing result we are looking for is one that is delicious—and nothing short of that. Some people ask how we evaluate pairings, and we say it’s the same way we evaluate food: It should taste great and provide lots of pleasure. (It can also be fun and interesting!) We’re not looking for what we consider to be lesser and insufficient standards for a pairing result. We’re looking for wine pairings that really elevate the food experience.

How we do what we do
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When the pairing idea is a general concept and not a specific wine recommendation, we select wines that will allow us to test whether that advice is true and to find out what kind of pairing result that advice creates. In some cases, we will pick a wine that is considered a benchmark for the wine recommended. In other cases, we will pick wines that represent the most common styles for the type of wine recommended. Either way, we always choose wines that will give the idea or recommendation a fair test.

About personal preference
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Some people think that liking a pairing is about personal preference. What they seem to mean by this is that if one person likes and recommends a pairing, another person may not because their palate and preferences are different. If pairing was strictly about personal preference, then the same could be assumed for liking food—and we all know that’s simply not true. There are numerous cases in which a chef or recipe developer creates a dish and many people like it—diners with a range of palates and flavor preferences.

We think people will like the pairing advice we recommend because we work with sommeliers renowned for developing and selecting pairings that many people enjoy—they know good pairings, they know the types of pairing experience people will like, and they have good taste when it comes to both food and pairings. It’s just like a restaurant that hires a chef who is known for creating great tasting food. They hire that chef because they have good taste when it comes to food and they have a good sense for what their target diner will like.

Meet the sommelier

Michael Dolinski’s career in wine began in 1991 at Marcel Desaulniers’ Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia. @michaeldolinskisomm
Pairing Results for all 37 wines and pairing recommendations we tested
Perfect Pairing

Beaujolais-Village, Lapalu 2019

(SRP $23.96)
Pairing Idea: Super fruity, light to medium bodied red wine
Pairing Results: I love this pairing. It's gorgeous. You get this wonderful herbal note, bits of rosemary. The wine picks up cilantro right away and lifts the savory notes in the vindaloo. That's delicious. I really thought this was going to be a white wine dish, but that's a great pairing. You have to keep the tannin down in the wine, the tannin is really low here. You have a wonderful bright Bing cherry taste and leafiness in the pairing result and that's delicious.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Perfect Pairing

Corbieres “Premiers Pas”, Domaine des Deux Anes 2019

(SRP $14.99)
Pairing Idea: Super fruity, light to medium bodied red wine
Pairing Results: This is fun. This is really good. The wine had wonderful red meat quality against the dish which is interesting--this is turning out to be more of a red wine dish. I would have anticipated a white wine. There's just enough acid that it stays fruit, but there's a softness. Because of its viscosity, it just softens the spice a bit but doesn't throw it out of balance. Indian spices are just not about the level of heat but balance of the multitude of ingredients. You need a wine that accentuates all the elements or you upset the apple cart, not an apple cart on one wheel or two but 12.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Perfect Pairing

Joseph Faiveley Bourgogne Pinot Noir 2019

(SRP $29.99)
Pairing Idea: This specific wine
Pairing Results: This is good. Enough sweetness right through the middle, enough acid to make sure the ripeness stays put. The wine stays sweet, fruit-driven, fresh, and the spice comes back at the end, almost like it cut the spice down, even though there is no residual sugar. I want to go in for another sip and another bite. It's great.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Perfect Pairing

Riesling Feinherb, Spater-Velt (Mosel) 2019

(SRP $16.99)
Pairing Idea: Medium-dry riesling
Pairing Results: The RS (residual sugar) is right. It works. It's not my favorite, but if you want to kill the spice off a little bit, this does it without throwing off the balance. The wine doesn't come off as sugary. Even with the spice, it comes off as balanced. I like that. Of the white wine pairings, this is one of my favorites.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Almost

Achaval Ferrer Malbec 2018

(SRP $24.96)
Pairing Idea: This specific wine
Pairing Results: Fun, I like what that does. There's a dark meat, smoky, gamey quality in the wine that the spice really brings out. A little bit of bitterness in the finish, but doesn't bother me. The wine starts to taste gamey and wild in a way that is interesting. I was worried there would be too much wood, but there's not. The wine is acid-driven without a lot of tannin, so the wine tastes bright, fresh fruity, gamey, savory, and the heat comes right back at you, but it's not out of balance because there's enough glycerine in the wine to keep the heat from over climbing. Great if you want a big wine.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Almost

Best’s “Great Western” Riesling (Australia) 2019

(SRP $19.99)
Pairing Idea: Off-dry riesling
Pairing Results: It works pretty well--not too much sugar, great acid, great freshness, tastes appley all the way through. But a bit too floral and bitter.
Pairing Characteristics   |   Print   |   Email   |   Text
Almost

Buchegger Zweigelt Rose Niederosterreich 2020

(SRP $14.96)
Pairing Idea: This specific wine
Pairing Results: You start to get a hint of strawberry fruit, that's exactly what the dish wants. The dish likes this red fruit. The wine is fresh, lifted, acid enough without floral then it stays strawberry. This is a very attractive way of pairing this dish. I can see this as a choice for pairing if you want this freshness.
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Almost

Clenden Family Vineyards “The Pip” Pinot Noir 2018

(SRP $27.99)
Pairing Idea: Super fruity, light to medium bodied red wine
Pairing Results: There's a little bitterness in the pairing result, but there's just enough cherry that everything stays fruit. Not too much bitterness, but there's a little.
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Almost

Fairvalley Pinotage (South Africa) 2018

(SRP $10.96)
Pairing Idea: South African pinotage
Pairing Results: I don't mind this, but it's just a little too hot in the end. The spice comes back on you a bit and the fruit doesn't quite stay deep enough in the finish.
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Almost

Rheingau Riesling Trocken, Weinhaus Ress 2019

(SRP $11.96)
Pairing Idea: Dry riesling
Pairing Results: I like the pairing, but it's not my favorite. The wine becomes more lemon juicy and more floral, it comes out a bit lemonade. Perfectly doable but we tasted better pairings in this session.
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Almost

Riesling, Villa Franz 2018

(SRP $11.96)
Pairing Idea: Sweet riesling
Pairing Results: Like the other wines that were more at this sweetness level, here the sweetness is welcome. Because the sugar is dialed back, it doesn't screw with the heat too much. Not my favorite pairing, but it's not bad. Something slightly off-balance at the end. I think I would pick something drier than that, but this is not bad.
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Almost

Terre Brulee Chenin Blanc (SA) 2019

(SRP $13.96)
Pairing Idea: This specific wine
Pairing Results: A bit more successful, the wine is very lifted, has enough fruit and acid. When you sip the wine you get the flavor of the wine, and then the curry comes back in the finish, the heat is not out of balance or unpleasant. We had better ones.
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