I have a wine dinner coming up this weekend, and I’ve picked up a bottle of 2021 Selbach Oster Wehlener Sonnenuhr Riesling Spatlese * which I need to find a pairing for. My wife and I tend to go for drier Rieslings most of the time, so I don’t have a good sense of what my best pairing options might be. Another issue is that my schedule ahead of the dinner is impacted, so I probably can’t spend than a few hours of my day shopping and cooking.
My current thought is to make something like simple roast pork tenderloins with a fruit (apricot?) sauce, but I’d love to hear suggestions from anyone who might be able to advise on specifics or broaden my horizons. Thanks!
It might go nicely with some sort of 5 spice pork, possibly belly pork for a bit of fattiness is best if you can find the time to cook it. You could think about serving some pak choi cooked with a little chili with it.
Pork for sure, but not tenderloins - without any fat, the Riesling magic won’t happen. I think you can go fruity on the sauce if you want, since a sauce like that won’t pair well with a dry Riesling. The old adage about your wine needing to be at least as sweet as your sauce has never steered me wrong, which is why I rarely make sweet sauces!
When I have made the pork with leeks from Marcella Hazan recipe.
I purchase the bone in loin and have the butcher remove the bones and tie them back on the loin. They add so much flavor
There are many other wines that would match easily with a savoury dish. The Spaetlese offers an opportunity to match with foods that are a little more challenging to pair with wine.
Agree that fat will be good, as will fruit and/or spice. Duck breasts might be a nice option and are very quick to cook if time is a factor–I’ve paired off-dry Rieslings with one-pan oven roasts of vegetables (root and/or brassicas) and moulard duck breasts glazed with a maple sugar/chipotle dry rub.
What else is going on with the wine dinner? What’s the context?
Pork and Riesling go sooooo well, together. I’m a huge fan of the sweet Riesling - spicy Thai food match, and that would be an easy bring for you guys, as you could simply order some takeout to bring over, or even have some delivered to the event. But this is where I start getting curious as to what else is going on with the dinner … I wouldn’t want to bring food that matches well with my wine but is going to mess-up wines that others bring — spicy Thai could definitely do that, depending on the other wines, and depending on the order in which the wines/food are served.
It’s a belated Secret Santa holiday dinner with my tasting group. Everyone submits a wish list, chooses a bottle that fits the giftee’s preferences, and brings one bottle of it to serve alongside a matching dish at a long dinner plus one clandestinely wrapped. Lots of fun. There’s a little bit of general planning ahead (“Are you bringing a starter, a main course, or a dessert?”), but that’s about it - we’re finalizing the order of dishes and wines on the fly.
Triangulating from the recommendations here, I think I’m leaning towards finding a relatively quick Chinese pork dish with a little spice - Char Siu using a fattier cut of meat and a bit of spice, or maybe a pork belly dish if I can find a suitable one which works in my timeframe.
And thanks for the Pork Loin with Leeks recipe recommendation, @scamhi - I’m a fan of Marcella Hazan’s book but have mostly stuck to just a handful of recipes…I haven’t made that one, but I bookmarked it for future reference.
Sounds like you’ve got it well figured out, Bret. Snap some pics and post them here, if you have a mind to!
+1 on the Thanks to you, @scamhi ! Like Bret, I love Marcella’s cookbook (it’s probably the last one I’d let go of, if someone started removing my cookbooks one by one), but – like Bret --, and for reasons I don’t exactly know, I have not extensively explored the recipes in there, and have not tried that pork loin recipe. All I know is every single thing I have made out of there has been wonderful. Looking forward to giving that pork recipe a try.
I haven’t had this particular bottle, but it should be on the leaner and more acidic side for a modern Spatlese. Pairings I like with Spatlese include: Thai, Chinese, Mexican food, pork (e.g., pulled pork, pork belly), fried chicken with a bit of heat, mild/medium buffalo wings, cheeseburgers and steak. The key to me is to match the heat, sweetness, and richness of the food with the level of the Riesling, so I’d try to go for things that are moderately to mildly sweet and spicy and fatty/rich for this wine.
On a related note, I’d expect this wine to be shutdown currently, but it will still pair very nicely with a variety of food.
Just a quick follow-up with a few photos and notes from this evening’ festivities - sadly diminished because a couple of our crew were out sick, so we were a couple of bottles and dishes short of what it would have been otherwise.
The gifts we gave were the Fino and the Spatlese (for the two people who couldn’t make it, coincidentally). All the wines drank pretty well - considering their respective styles. I didn’t notice the Spatlese being shut down, although I don’t have much of a frame of reference for it. We served it a little on the warm side (just under room temp), which may have helped…it still had plenty of acid to keep it fresh.
The pork recipe was adapted from Molly Stevens “All About Roasting,” modified slightly based on a couple of online recipes I found. Here it is, fresh out of the oven (some of them caught just slightly at the end, but not enough to detract):
I got delayed in my shopping and didn’t get my hands on pork that was as rich as I had hoped I’d find, which was unfortunate. In the end it came out okay, reminiscent of similar versions we’d had at restaurants but not very exciting (to me, at least). The match with the wine was also just okay - neither food nor wine was significantly enhanced by the other. Still, it was great to catch up, and we had a good time.
I don’t have a ton of experience with sherry (we drink it maybe once every year or two), but I quite liked it. It was nicely rich and flavorful for a Fino…notably saline, with a little lemony citrus and the expected nutty oxidized notes, plus something on the nose that reminded some of us of cognac/armagnac and maybe a background white floral note.
I’d say our group was about evenly split between “This is good,” “I haven’t had dry sherry and think this is weird on its own, but it works with food,” and “I haven’t had dry sherry, and I don’t like it.”
Haha! Yeah, that array of responses sounds about right for Sherry, particularly a Fino. I have a bottle of that one, but have yet to crack it — it doesn’t help that my significant other falls in the “I don’t like it.” category when it comes to Sherry.
My wife will drink it with a charcuterie board or something similar, but I don’t think she’d ever choose it, and when we do open one, it’s unlikely that she’ll have more than one glass.
I’d guess we might open ours when the weather is warmer this summer, but considering that it’s a full-size bottle, I might have to find (or invent) an occasion to open it with some sherry-curious friends…if I can find any
Bring it on down to L.A. and I’ll pop a number of others alongside! One great thing about Sherry is that it keeps so well once opened. I sometimes sip off a bottle for more than a month, simply leaving it recorked, in the fridge after opening.
The worst thing about Sherry is that it’s my kryptonite. It is extreeeeemly rare that I need to use the “Missing Presumed Drunk” option when consuming a bottle in CT. That said, of the times I have had to use it (56 times in 18 yeas of CT use, and only 42 if I remove beer), 8 of them have been for Sherry. As much as I love Sherry, I don’t drink it very frequently, yet nearly 20% of my MPD bottles have been Sherry. And those 8 MPD bottles represent 18% of the bottles of Sherry I’ve consumed in CT over the years. That’s pretty nuts. How does that happen? Welllll, all-too-often, I go for a sip of Sherry late at night, when I want another beer but don’t want a whole 'nother beer — so I tell myself, “Hey! How 'bout just a lil sip of Sherry instead!? Brilliant!!!” Next thing I know (or don’t know, I suppose), the bottle is gone and I ultimately forget to remove it from inventory. It’s happened far too often to be anything other than a pattern at this point.
