Birthday Thai

Hard as it is to imagine, I get older every year. This year was no exception. By tradition, Pav and I gather our friends together to celebrate our birthdays (his is shortly before mine) in an interesting way. Last year Samoa (sort of), the year before lawn bowls, this year – Thai food and wine matching.

PhuThai Esarn is one of a handful of great Thai places in Wellington. We sorted out a varied set menu for 12 and asked our friend Rebecca Taylor who writes a wine column for the Capital Times (Wine Press) to think up some interesting wine matches for us. And she came up trumps. 

Grilled squid

Our chosen menu included a good mix of spice, heat and milder flavours. Consensus says that the top dishes were the Nam-tok Beef (grilled beef with fresh herbs and lime juice), the Larb Pork (pork salad, with lime juice, chilli and red onion) and the Kang Phed Ped Yang (red duck curry). That last being a sweet, creamy mix with pineapple and duck. The fresh spring rolls are a personal favourite of mine.

Being Thai, it's all a fine balance between spicy (chilli), salty (usually fish sauce), sweet (brown sugar or similar) and sour (lemons, limes, kaffir lime leaves...). Matching wine with that's a fun game as any one of those can fight with some wines. 

 The wines that Rebecca came up with were spot on. She texted tasting notes as she was running a bit late, so we did as instructed and started with the Black Estate Riesling 2010 as an aperitif. This is a Waipara wine from a family owned vineyard and was a smooth start to the night. But it came into its own when the entrees arrived. The fruitiness of the wine was fun to roll around the mouth with the various degrees of flavour and spice in the fish cakes, fresh spring rolls, deep fried goodies and, particularly, the Meuk Yang grilled squid with a chilli dressing. No nasty sauvignon-chilli clash here thank you very much. 

Red duck curry

As mains arrived we slid gently into the Seifried Würzer 2008, another South Island number – Nelson this time. Würzer is a rare German variety with only about 100 hectares planted around the world. Seifried says it has NZ's only Würzer plantings. The founders of Seifried have German heritage, so it's not outrageous that they might give this a go. The grape is a cross between Gewurztraminer and Muller-Thurgau (don't let that last put you off) and goes beautifully with the prickly heat and saltiness of Thai food, as we discovered. The tasting notes say elderflower, peach, apricot and sherbet flavours, which is fair enough. The sweetness which might be annoying in other food matches works wonderfully here. This was everyone's favourite wine of the evening.

The third bottle was a 12,000 Miles Pinot Noir 2010 from Gladstone out in the Wairarapa. I didn't get much of this as I had been enjoying the whites so much (and briefly forgetting my obligations to you, dear reader), but the little I did have was also well matched with the spice. That's interesting because I wouldn't think to order red wine with spicy food usually – I guess it's the spicy food = hot country = cooling white wines linkage in my head. Just goes to show that we should all check our assumptions every so often.

You too should check out PhuThai Esarn in the middle of Cambridge Tce, or its sister PhuThai Lanna on the corner of Vivian and Tory Sts. And take some risks in your wine matches. Hunt down a Würzer!

PhuThai Esarn

35-38 Cambridge Tce

Wellington

04 801 5006

www.phuthaiesarn.co.nz