James Bercovici - The Big Red Wine Company

With no imminent possibility of dining out, I have been pushing myself to come up with more authentic versions of all the foods we really enjoy. I'm a reasonably decent cook and have long since mastered Mediterranean foods (although there is always room for expansion of knowledge, hopefully not at the expense of waistlines). Chinese cooking has much improved since a family member invested in a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop's excellent book on Sichuan cooking. For some reason though I have never made a great curry... until recently. Of course, any recipe followed has to be developed according to taste so, for me, the sauce part of The Ivy's chicken masala has to be blitzed to a smooth, thick paste and served on a bed of fluffy basmati rice with Madhur Jaffrey's chicken tikka (she uses cream rather than yoghurt. It's much more authentic) cooked as whole chicken breasts and sliced over the top of the curry sauce (isn't that a tautology?). But what wine to serve with cu...

A local friend who hails from India by way of Kenya and Ealing has his ageing mother living with him now. She wanted to cook an authentic curry for his friends so last night we all piled round to enjoy something rather more subtle than the curries I make at home (or get from the local take-away). I asked what the curry was called to learn that it translated simply as "chicken curry" - no fancy names then. I had been asked to provide some wines and, whilst there were a couple of whites on the table, I stuck with the reds, of course. A Domaine de la Charite Cotes du Rhone had good fruit and a sufficiently soft structure not to be bothered by the spice. However, I was more surprised that the Domaine de Mourchon Seguret from 2007 drank so well alongside the (admittedly fairly mildly) spicy food. Perhaps more understandably, the maturing 2009 Cotes du Rhone from Domaine Bressy-Masson with its softened tannins provided secondary fruit characters that blended well with the spic...