We eat a lot of spicy food and we get bored with our more traditional wine pairings of riesling or vidal.  Because of that, I did some web searching too look for some other recommendations of wines we might want to try.  Our first experiment involving kung pao tofu and torrontes was a big hit.  We recently undertook our second experiment.  For this one we opened the 2010 Sauvion Vouvray from the Loire Valley in France (vouvray is made from chenin blanc grapes), an off-dry wine.

The wine initially offered a red apple nose that was crisp and refreshing.  There were also some floral and tropical notes.  As the wine warmed a bit more, I also noted some hay.  Once I started to sip, I initially wrote down “floral banana” and that the wine had a fuller mouth feel than I had expected given the crisp nose.  As the wine warmed, the flavors became more balanced (too cold ≠ good wine), and I noted honey, apricot, and nectarine.  The wine was a bit sweeter than I’d normally go for, but I was looking for a wine to go with spicy food, and this one also offered some nice acid which worked for me.

Our dinner that night was curried tofu with spinach and tomatoes.  The dish ended up less spicy than we’d intended (my fault – I’m sure GEG will fill you in with his comment), but I still think the wine worked well.

We had enough of this wine left over that we revisited it a few nights later when we made a curried chicken stew.  While the wine offered a lot less fruit and had less depth after a few days in the fridge (just closed with its screw cap), it was still a welcome addition to our dinner.  Given that we forgot about the wine for 3 days, I think it held up pretty well, and it definitely worked well with the heat that we succeeded in building into this second curry dish.

Chenin Blanc in general and Vouvray in particular is new to me, so I’ll need to experiment more to see if this was a bit of a fluke success or if I can expect this to work in the future, but I’m happy to have added yet another wine option to our spicy food nights.