Gewurztra-weekend!

My last two wine and food pairing attempts didn't go as well as I'd hoped and I really wanted to knock one out of the park so I picked a wine from our bar, (2010 Angel's Gate Gewurztraminer), and consulted the Canadian Wine Wheel before designing the menu.  Along with several incarnations of the word, "spicy", it specifically suggested coriander, cumin, five spice and garam masala, leading me to Indian cuisine; samosas contain all of those!  It also suggested sweet potato as a vegetable, and I knew of a salad I'd been wanting to try with roasted yams and a whole slew of fresh spices.  The salad recipe came from the vegetarian cookbook, Plenty, from which every meal is both yummy, and painstakingly difficult.  The first challenge in this one was finding a particular ingredient: dried Persian limes.  Three different stops and 1/4 tank of gas later, I found them at an Arabic store on  Concession St. between Upper Wentworth and Upper Wellington.  The next challenge was the preparation; most salads don't require the use of a roasting pan, a frying pan, a sauce pan and a rice cooker!  The samosas were much easier, since we cheated and got takeout from The Himalaya, a vegetarian East Indian restaurant near Eastgate Mall.  We also picked up our dessert there, consisting of various brightly coloured pastries.

Onto the wine, we'd tried this gewurz before, and remember liking it, but do tend to have a positive bias towards Angels Gate.  It has a striking gold colour to it and its bouquet features what Chris calls citrus and what I call dish soap, which I mean in a nice way.  The initial taste has two dominant features: minerality and alcohol, only the first of which is good.  The sourness did weaken both as the wine aerated and as we ate.  Actually, this turned out to be a perfect pair, or trio, as it were.  The wine picked up the spices in the samosas which in tern brought out the spices in the wine, and the flavour intensities were evenly matched.  Meanwhile, the sweet potato and feta in the salad worked to cool down our mouths, and the dried lime, mint and lemon juice all played off of the wine's citrus notes.  Once the food was gone and the wine had had more time to breathe, its dominant flavour became sour green apple, and it shared the quick dryness of the fruit.

Overall, we like this wine but find it really needs food and aeration, both anomalies for an Ontario white.  I'd like to find one with a similar body and flavour but either less alcohol or more sugar to alleviate the sourness.  That will be our goal tomorrow as we  head out for the first weekend of Niagara-on-the-Lake's Wine & Herb festival to taste 3 other gewurz pairings.  I might add, though, to keep this wine far away from desserts.  Later in the evening when we tried our extra-sweet treats from Himalaya, the wine became too sour to drink by comparison!