Hey, you're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. This is an aromatic room full of scents, and in this aromatic room with me today. I'm Alicia, I do wine, and yes, it is pungent. I am Scott, I am the wine manager in Vernon Hills. And I'm Barbara, and I'm the wine director for The Chain. All right, Scott, what's your bona fides? Why did we invite you here today? All right, in a previous life, before I worked at Binny's, I was a classically trained chef. I worked mostly in hotels, but it was pretty quick that I realized my real passion was wine. That is when I came to work at Binny's, where I very quickly was then put back into a kitchen at the demonstration kitchen in the Binny's in Highland Park. In Highland Park. You've made some good stuff that I've had over the years. Some good, some were experimental. Was I there for that? I don't know. Scott won me over to Turkey two thanksgivings ago. Oh, yes. We did have that Turkey food and wine pairing. Yeah. I proved that just like Chardonnay, not all Turkey is the same. We're going to have him back sometime for Turkey. It doesn't suck. Yeah. It's not dried out. We invited Scott on. He's going to give his chef's perspective today alongside all of the wine knowledge that he has too. But I have to tell you the stories how this came to be. About a month ago, we recorded a podcast with this junk food and wine pairings, and Emily, a wine consultant at one of our stores, led that, and it was like donuts and Moscato and things. Ice cream. Ice cream and sherry and so forth. So we were talking about this in the office. I feel like I was invited to the wrong podcast. Barb wanted it on the action. We're doing another version here, but with very different food and very different wine. So Barb, tell us about what your vision was with what you selected today. So first of all, I have to admit, I am fundamentally basically everything a red wine lover. Now, while I appreciate Riesling, I think it's a fascinating grape variety. Same thing for Chenin Blanc. They're amazing. I do drink a lot of white burgundy. When I'm sitting down with food, I want to drink red wine. The whole idea of this food and wine pairing thing interested me because if you look at a lot of recipes, or you look at recommendations on what to pair with, particularly like Asian food or Indian food, it always says, drink Riesling or drink something off dry or drink a versterminer. Frankly, I'm not interested in drinking those. I drink these kinds of foods. We decided to combine a couple of different reds and some pretty interesting food. Yeah. I think I love how you put it the other day, kind of the red wine drinkers' dilemma, when you are thinking about ordering or visiting restaurants that specialize in curries and Thai cuisine or Chinese food. All the spices, right? Yeah. Spices and really intense flavors. That's correct. If you suggest some red, sometimes people look at you like you're a cretin or something. So, what do we have up first? Again, we have a lot of food and a lot of wine on this table. Where are you taking us first, Barb? Well, the first thing we're going to try is Pad Thai. We have four reds that actually I selected. They're just, I think, because they're kind of an interesting kind of cross-section of a, oh, for sure, like California and France. So we have 2018 Ridge Lytton Spring, which is basically a Zin blend. 2018 Cross-Born Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. We have a 2018 Gigandasse from Domaine Piaget from the Rhone, and 2015 Baron de Brun from Margaux in Bordeaux. So some very untraditional pairings here. And so let's go ahead. We're going to start by tasting the Ridge Simphandel. And we'll kind of just taste it on our own. We can share just general thoughts on the wine, and then we'll go in, have the food, have the wine, and comment on this pairing. Barb, one of your favorite wines of last year, from one of our episodes, The Buyer's Picks, was a Ridge wine too, right? That's correct. It was the Petite Seurat, the Lytton Spring from the same veneer area. You might be a little bit of a Ridge super fan. Well, I do think I am a big Ridge super fan, although to be honest with you, I don't actually own any Ridge, but it's pretty easy to go out there and buy some and drink it right away. Although I have friends that do a 10-year zin tasting every year for Ridge, and they probably do a 20-year zin tasting every year. So does it show up? Does it actually have the guts to last? Yeah. Ridge is an old winery for California, great reputation and there are probably a lot of collectors all around the country that have a lot of 10, 20, even 30-year-old Ridge zins. This is spicy zin. Spicy, compact fruit, but really refreshing acidity as well. It's a fun wine. I think it's actually quite an easy drinking, approachable zinvendel. And I've actually seen them even spicier than this. Yeah, very a lot of very bramble kind of berry fruit flavors to it. Almost like mulberry, almost like black kind of berries to it. And quite round, very juicy. It has like 18 percent petite serrani, but it definitely doesn't have those mouth-gripping tannins. Yeah, which should help us out here with our pad thai. My thoughts exactly, yeah. Just tasting that ripe fruit on there, it's making me optimistic for the spicy food pairing. Because counter to Barb, I am a huge white wine fan. And so I am that guy who will definitely recommend white wines anytime someone brings up Asian food. So this will be a fun one for me. All right, let's do it. So this one's going with the pad thai. Indeed. And this is just normal pad thai. Normal pad thai, medium spice level with tofu. Medium spice, it doesn't even register. So the pad thai is pretty mellow, right? I mean, it's nutty, peanuts have flavor in there. Yep. And oily. So having something, like, it's probably pretty easy to recommend a white wine like a Sauvignon Blanc or something with some acidic cut to bring more life to this. Which makes it especially challenging for a red, especially like as in that's notorious for being heavy. I don't think that's a problem with this specific pairing though. Yeah, I totally agree. I think all that juicy fruit, you can see the fruitiness of the wine kind of is dialed back once you pair it with the Pad Thai. But because we started out with so much, that's why one of the reasons it works. And as Barb mentioned too, that the tannins aren't especially grippy, so you don't have any kind of increased like bitterness as well. Yeah, agreed. The thing about the Pad Thai is it's not a very intense flavored dish, but it does have a fair amount of body. It's a weighty dish. I mean, the noodles are heavy, the sauce is a little bit oily, like you said. And so picking a very full-bodied red, I think works very well to bring those two together. I definitely agree. So Scott, I want to hear from you in your culinary background, what are some different approaches to food and wine pairing? Because you hear different recipes for success from different people. There's definitely a lot of different roadmaps that people follow for conducting a good food and wine pairing. And none of them are better or worse than the other, but they will get you to a good pairing, just maybe with a different wine. And so one that I like and what I was referencing with the Pad Thai is weight and intensity of the food versus weight and intensity of the wine. So the idea of being there, if you have a food that has a lot of texture to it, something very heavy, oily, creamy, you want to see that same kind of thing reflected in the weight of the wine. So fuller bodied, typically higher ABV wines, those end up pairing very well. And then you also have to match the intensity of the flavor. So typically a less aromatic wine with something that is a milder dish and then maybe something that's very spicier, aromatic to go with something that mirrors that in the food. That makes a lot of sense. My brain, that's... I'm too dumb for that. That is not where my brain went right away, but that makes so much sense. But you understood that. Yes. Good. Oh yeah, for sure. All right. So Greg approved. It is probably one of the lesser known ways of doing a pairing with your typical shopper. They're used to the age-old red meat with red wine and white meat with white wine, and that's where the bug stops with the education. I mean, there's not enough space in everybody's brain to keep all this very niche knowledge. Yeah. Well, I think decades ago, Americans had really no regard for food and wine pairing whatsoever. Then they caught on that they should be keeping this in mind. Then to your point, they just loved the rules of, I'm going to have red beets, I'm going to have red wine, and white wine only goes with fish, and really just put themselves in boxes. And I think now we're finally confident enough to experiment. And today, I don't think I would ever have thought of having Indian food with a Margot, and we're going to have that. And so it's pretty fun. I should have definitely eaten lunch before this because I am hungry. Yeah. Right. You can keep eating. I know. Did you go through all of your pad thai? Do I need to hand you more? Yeah. I'm going to see if I like the Indian stuff. Pick the favorites. He also wore a white shirt today. Yeah. All right. So I think a solid pairing, and especially if you like Zinfandel, you want to stick with it. I think neither the food nor the wine took away from one another when you put them together. Is there anything dangerous to pair with Zinfandel that just won't work? Ice cream. Right. Like barbecue sauces, we always talk about, but too much spiciness, like heat versus, I guess if it's heavy on the fruit, it's not going to be a problem. So in my experience with Zinfandel, that's actually one of my favorite barbecue wines because it doesn't typically have the same level of acidity or tannin as like, say, a Cabernet. Cabernet would like really butt up against it. Cabernet would really kill your barbecue or really more vice versa. I mean, how intense barbecue can be. I mean, if you're going really heavy on the sauce, you want a wine that has a lot of weight to back that up, and Zinfandel is notoriously high alcohol, so that means the body is going to be a lot higher, and it's going to withstand that a little bit more. If you do add a little bit of heat to your barbecue sauce, there isn't enough tannin or acid to really like exacerbate that heat. In the case of Zinfandel, at least in my experience, if you add enough heat to anything, you'll kill the pairing and you might as well switch to beer, but if you keep it mild and balanced. Or Barbara's favorite, Off Drive Racing. Yes, good verge demeanor for everything. Right. Our next entree, we are having some dumplings, and I think they're pork, veggie, mushroom. Like mushrooms in here. So pretty kind of classic dumpling. And we are going to have this with the cross-barn pinot noir. So what were you thinking, Barbara, when you selected the cross-barn pinot specifically from Sonoma Coast? This is a Paul Hobbs wine, quite affordable pinot offering. Well, I wanted something that was certainly a contrast to the French that I selected. So, again, I wanted pinot noir made a lot of sense because number one, it's a very popular grape variety, and everybody drinks a lot of it. Also very, very low in tannin, but quite sweet, you know, fruits, sweet aroma and with this pretty kind of a velvety mouthfeel to it. So again, just to give a little bit of a contrast versus something, you know, that bigger bolder spices in, they're a little drier, you know, more stringent bordeaux. This is a pretty ready to go pinot noir, right? It's like just soft and fruity. It's not simple, but there's not a lot of barrier to entry on it either. What do you guys think about the pinot noir? I totally agree. It is definitely more of that nice kind of sweeter fruit style. We're not getting too much on the savory side that you might get, you know, maybe some from some other producers or up in the Willamette or in Burgundy, for example. But for those that want just kind of bursting with red fruit, little bit of blue fruit as well, and those low tannins, high acid. This, I think, probably is more of a traditional red wine pairing with some of these foods. People might be more familiar with it, and I actually really love it with the pod sticker. I think the kind of the fatty starchiness is cut through by the acid. The fruit deals with the umami that's present, which can be a little bit dicey. So, yeah, this one's a home run. Alicia, I saw you do this, so I did it too. I went a little hard on the soy sauce. The saltiness and the umami from the soy sauce. Yeah. It's wonderful. I mean, everything's better by soy sauce in life. Ice cream. Ice cream. Yeah, no, I agree with this pairing. I think that the aroma on this wine, it's not a very candied style of pinot, but it has a little bit of this smokiness and underbrush quality along with the dried fruits. I think it's really enhanced with particularly maybe the mushrooms that are in the dumplings. But again, round and again, not a sweet, not a candied wine. It's a little more firmness, a little bit of structure to it and a little like this underbrushy earthiness to it. This is very much so, at least in my mind, it seems like a very classic pairing just brought to us in a little bit of a different vessel. It's pork, there's mushrooms, there's vegetables. Those are all things that go really well with pinot noir, like very classic pairings. This just also happens to be in a wrapper and fried a little bit. I do really like this one. Going back to different methods of pairing food and wine, this is one of those moments where you're analyzing the components of the various foods and then also the wines and trying to either match or contrast something. In this case, we've got again a little fattier food, pork tends to be a little bit higher in fat, and that acid is great, like Greg said, for just cutting through a little bit. But then also in good pinot noir, in aged pinot noirs especially, you can get that earthy, almost to the point of mushroomy type of character. So finding that flavor in the food and then finding that flavor in the wine, you're going to have some amount of good luck with getting a pairing going between those two. You're so right. I love how you broke down. Just think about your ingredients within the dumpling or the potstick or whatever is wrapped up in dough that you're about to have. Break those down and you can even think, what would I normally pair with those ingredients? Yeah, the umami element of the mushroom, I think, accentuates that in the wine, way more than I got when I just had the wine by itself. Again, I said I didn't have much savory just going on. Then you have it with the mushrooms and some of the vegetables and it brings out a lot of that stuff. Now, in this case, I think it definitely enhances the wine in my opinion. I agree. That's why a lot of times whenever I'm approached by a customer and the question is, oh, hey, I need a wine to bring to dinner. What should I bring? The question isn't just, what are you eating? A lot of times you'll get a vague answer of, oh, I'm having chicken, I'm having pork, we're having steak. The more important question is, what all is going on it? What's the preparation? Okay, you're having a pork chop, we could do any number of things here. But as soon as they say that they're going to have some roasted vegetables and they're going to have a mushroom sauce over it, well, now you have a very specific wine in mind that can go with that. Whereas, you know, grilled pork chops or even bacon, bacon is a type of pork. They're all very different foods. So getting that method of prep is very important. So speaking of that, when we had the Pad Thai, it wasn't like a huge flavor, but in the Pad Thai is thin cut green onion, and that seems like it could potentially be a risk. How do you pair with something astringent like onion? That is one of the hardest questions when it comes to pairing food and wine. Now do asparagus. That's super easy. Oh, really? Yeah. Asparagus, there's certain areas of the world that their wines work perfectly with asparagus. We're going to go with the easy one first so I can talk about that instead. With whites anyway, it gets easier because you get greener about leaner or something that has a vegetal aroma to it and it's a beautiful pairing or a dry mascot. Those are great things to go with asparagus or anything like really green vegetable heavy. But if you're doing a red, then yeah, you got to look at, again, what are things that have that kind of character to it perhaps. So in my mind, when I'm pairing with vegetarian cuisine, I'm looking at the Sangiovese, I'm looking at Cabernet Franc. Those are the red wine. Cabernet Franc underripe can get like real peppery. It can be very, very green. Yes. That can actually be a boon when you're trying to pair something. If you have one that you know is really cool climate and doesn't get quite as ripe, that's why you really had to know what you're picking. Well, I think this is going to lead to the next wine tasting and food pairing challenge. We have to have asparagus and red wine. There you go. Well, I'm a huge fan of this. These are both components, the dumplings and the bottle of wine, that I could order a dozen of the dumplings and just be very happy with the bottle of wine on my sofa all night. Not to mention the fact that the one that I have, the pot stickers that you got, fried, a little bit crispy. It's really easy to eat that. It is really, really easy to eat that. Barbara, how often do you have this type of food? I'm curious, I'm curious, Barbara, at home, you ordering a lot of this stuff, making a lot of it? I rarely ever order out. I almost say never order out. So, and I go, we go to a restaurant maybe once a week, or what, but so, but I definitely, I cook all the time. And I do cook a lot with kind of an Asian style. So I use a lot of ginger. I learned that you keep your ginger in the freezer. Correct. Oh, really? Your ginger root? Yeah. I just keep mine out. So, well, if you can use a lot of it, you can. And even I do use a, I'm sure I use more ginger than like some cities, which probably still isn't very much, but ginger can get kind of bad pretty quickly. Right. So you keep it like in a bag in your freezer. And when you take it out, you can either just grate it or I just find that if you just even put it under a little bit of running, like running water for like three seconds, take a paring knife, you can cut it, shave off the outside a little bit, and then slice it up with a knife. It's a really good way to keep it. So I do go through a lot of that, a lot of garlic, a lot of vegetable and meat stir fries. Indian food I'll do. I mean, I'll do, actually I do a lot of lentils. We're going to have some chana dal in a little while. I do a lot of lentils, mainly in the winter. So I'm not totally, yeah. So this is up your alley. Yeah. And in fact, actually the next dish we're going to have, we're going to pair with kimchi, although, and I do love kimchi, although the one that we got for this event is, it's a very, very mild kimchi. Yeah. It's like a beginner kimchi. Chain grocery store kimchi is perhaps not as exciting. So we didn't cut up our own cabbage, bury it in a pot in the backyard for three months to let it ferment. Who here has made kimchi? Shout out to Brett Pontani. I guarantee you he's made kimchi. Oh yeah, for sure. He's told me about it. I have made my own kimchi before, yes. It's part of the culinary school experience. It's not something I actively pursue at home nowadays. But yes, I have made kimchi before. All right. Well, let's go into it. Okay. What do we have here? So this next dish we're having actually is Korean, and we have two takes on it. It's a variation in bulgogi. We do have some steak bulgogi, and then we have some, what's a proper word like a meat? Meat. Fake chicken. Fake chicken. Okay. Fake chicken with kimchi. This episode brought to you by fake chicken. Fake chicken. It's got to be Satan based, right? You try this? It's got to be what based? Satan. Satan. S-E-I-T-A-N, which is kind of Asian. It's gluten. It's wheat gluten. Oh, got you, got you. Okay. Pressed hard and dry and then fried. I've read the word. I've never heard the word spoken out loud. Sometimes people say it's like Saitan and stuff, but it's just Satan. Our Dark Lord in the flesh right now. We are pairing this Korean barbecue with the Jigondas from the Southern realm. Here we go. Jigondas is pretty good on its own. It smells wonderful. It is right up your alley. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Barb, this wine is great. It's spicy and it's full and it's heavy raspberry, ripe raspberry. That's great. It is a very excellent wine. It's very reasonable. It's under $30 for a Jigondas. Piaget. To main the Piaget, Jigondas. Yes. That's all I know about it. Seal of approval right here. Yeah. But it still has that kind of pepperiness, that kind of garig, herbal quality that you get in the Southern realm. A lot going on. Yeah. Really nice wine. You can also add in another fancy word called feet because it has a little bit of that, that kind of cooked little cooked ganache. We're doing that with the kimchi and the meat or fake meat at the same time. Okay. With my meat-free lifestyle choice, Korean barbecue is one thing I don't think I've ever actually experienced. For me, all of the non-fruit qualities of the wine are really drawn out. The fruit becomes a little bit less juicy, and all that peppery, earthy, herbal quality is the star of the show now in the wine. Yep. Right. It seems more focused. Yeah. Scott, is that the kimchi that's drawing down the appearance of the fruit? That's the way I'm taking it. I can't say I've paired kimchi with wine before. You're missing something. Yeah, apparently. I actually enjoyed that quite a bit because it was fun getting a lot more of that earthy kind of... I always describe Southern Rhone as kind of like this dusty fruit and the fruit to kind of fall away and you get this nice earthy, herbal quality to it. I'm enjoying that quite a bit. I'm going to have to get another taste in here to really kind of put my finger on what's going on though. What I find with this wine is that I think it's a combination of the wine, obviously, and maybe the food too, but the Giganasse is a pretty full-bodied wine. And I think that it really feels more velvety and rounder in the finish, perhaps with the food. And I know it's going to sound kind of funny, but it almost makes it, to me, feel kind of quenching the way it goes down because you take the bite of the kimchi and the beef, and then you have this kind of like wine that becomes very seamless like at Yeah, there is a, after you have the kimchi and you're in desperate need of something to drink, yeah, the fleshiness of it alongside kind of that earthy component, kind of is quite satisfying. Yeah, again, I think it's, we're finding the peppery-ness of that Grenache and having that hit with the spice of the Korean barbecue, I think that's where we're hitting that little bit of harmony. Yeah. That's going on. Again, you do lose the fruit a little bit, which like Barb said, this is a pretty mild kimchi. I'm used to having ones that also have a little bit more salt to them, which I think would kind of brighten up the wine a little bit more too. So maybe if we hit this with a little soy sauce, it might actually change that up a little bit. Pulling the soy sauce off the table. So what's actually in kimchi? It's cabbage. Is there actually vinegar or is that just a product of the fermentation? A lot of times that's just a product of the fermentation. When I've made it in the past, it was pretty simple. It was cabbage, some other vegetables that we just had as kind of scrap from whatever we had been making that day, and then some chili flakes, other spices, and then salt to draw out the moisture. Then you just wrap it up and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Let it do its own thing. So it literally just ferments on your counter or wherever you're making it? I'd recommend in like a refrigerator just- In your refrigerator or wherever you're making it. That's the serve safe manager and me being like, at least you probably put this in the refrigerator. I think a lot of times it is done at room temperature. You've made yogurt, right? I have not ever had to make my own yogurt. I did. So Tony, Wine Manager at Highland Park, he gave me his mom's yogurt as a starter. I just got a towel wrapped around a glass bowl of milk with a sealed top. I'm like, it's been sitting in my living room, I'm in my dining room for a week, like is this okay? Is this going to be okay? It was fine. Did it smell? Well, I mean, not without taking the lid off. Oh, sure. It was covered. So how did it turn out? Yogurt-y. I mean, that's what yogurt is. It's just you get some yeast in there and it does its thing. I mean, I had a Dan and yogurt maker like 40 years ago. Yeah. There was a little machine and it had, I don't remember, maybe half a dozen cups in there. You'd put little actual yogurt and milk and then it heated it at a certain temperature. So it's something you could do. Home fermenting is a certain threshold of culinary endeavor that a lot of people maybe never try, never dip their toe in that pool. I'll leave that one to you all. That definitely falls in the category of pay someone else to do. I'll buy my yogurt at the store. Unless you have a huge kitchen and you got a lot of counter space. But as a kimchi eater, and I agree, I picked out this one because it was really quite mild. But I don't normally just sit there and eat kimchi by the spoonful and drink very famous old red wines or whatever. But it's been, can we all picture that for a moment? That is a good image, yeah. But I have, sometimes I get a craving for kimchi, so I'll eat a couple of bites of it, and I'll have an older wine, often actually Bordeaux or Burgundy open. Especially with Burgundy, it's very interesting. I think that the heat in that kimchi just sort of like all of a sudden shoots out the sweetness in an older Pinot in particular. It's surprising. It really makes it like almost explode, become very, very fresh and lively. Make it feel young again. Make it feel young again. Yeah, yeah. But I've also heard, you know, I mean, like from other people into the food and wine thing, that some of the opposites happen. So like if you're eating something that's really, really hot, it shuts down. It affects certain, like taste buds. And then others are like receptive or. Yeah, I remember delving into that a little bit. It's not something that I'm very well versed in. But yeah, there's some thought as to like, when you add a little bit of heat to something, it can make your tongue a little bit more receptive to sweeter flavors, which is why sometimes for a lot of sweet dishes, you'll notice or some people will do it on their own, is adding a little pinch of cayenne to a certain dessert sauces and things like that. Not enough that you'd ever actually know that there's cayenne in it, but just because it'll enhance the experience of whatever sweet thing that Doesn't Mexican chocolate have cayenne in it? Yeah. That's one of the great things about those more rustic Mexican desserts is even just something as simple as having chili powder on a mango. It makes the mango so much sweeter and more enjoyable because you have that heat there and they balance each other out, much like a sweeter Riesling with spicy Asian food. Isn't that right, Barb? I was going to go the other way. But yeah, I've now had the kimchi with the soy sauce and I think it really did liven up that pairing a little bit. Same. Try it too. Again, soy sauce, making everything better. If you ever have a wine that's just not really showing its fruit and you have some food that you're going to be in with it, adding a little bit of extra salt is really going to bring that back, kind of like what Barb was saying with that old Pinot, or aged Pinot, sorry, with her old wine. Having that spicier kimchi, that extra heat and maybe some salt in there, that's going to make those all more vibrant. Where's our grilled swordfish? That's in the Mediterranean food pairing. Oh, that's next week. Okay. No? No. I don't, grilled swordfish, I don't think it's that good. Really? It's such a tough, meaty fish. I don't know, there's just other fishes I'd go to first. Scott, can you validate my claim? Well, you're 100% right that it is a tougher fish and it is definitely meaty. That's why a lot of people enjoy it, is because they're looking for something with fuller body. That is definitely a fish that goes well with red wines. I love swordfish, but it's also very easy to do it wrong, because it's a fish that can lend itself to being cooked to medium, not quite all the way to well done. When it gets cooked all the way, it almost resembles tuna a little bit at that point, like good tuna that you've overcooked. Oh, womp, womp. Yeah. You can see the disappointment in Greg's face. So good. If you get swordfish that's cooked in a similar fashion, where it's got some nice seasoned crust on it, and it's still a little bit medium rare or medium, it's a lot nicer. Okay. Yeah. We'll all meet up at Binny's demo kitchen in Highland Park for Scott to- We'll do our things Alicia thinks she doesn't like podcast. We'll start with turkey, then we'll go into swordfish. It's been preparation all the time. I'm imagining swordfish is the turkey of the sea. I think that's salmon, like the chicken of the sea. But that's for a different reason. No, that's a trademark. So we're going to use turkey of the sea. Greg would know his packets in his office. All right. Let's stop talking about me. What do we got next? All right. So for our last pairing here, we are going to go to some Indian food. What did you select for us, Barb? So we have a Chana Masala, that's a chickpea curry with saffron and tuberic rice. Along with that, we're going to taste the 2015 Baron de Brun from Margot. That's the second label of Brun Cantonec, Chateau Brun Cantonec. This one seemed risky to me. It's probably not overly spicy. The spices that you described there are more on the delicate side, but the reputation for Bordeaux to be a little herbal, a little reedy, a little austere. It sounds scary to me, so I'm excited to try this and be proven wrong. The wine itself, I've not gotten to the food yet, is absolutely delicious. But I think out of any region, well, I would trust Barbara with any wine pick, but Bordeaux especially. Yeah, I said this was the one we had the other day, which is very similar. I said, if you fly United International, this is an option, but they're vegetarian option, Indian curry. It's probably the best thing on the plane. It is probably, yeah. At least for sure in the economy. Okay. So Barbara, what were you thinking with Margot and Indian food? Well, the reason I think this is a pretty good match is because very classic aroma and a lot of Bordeaux, particularly like this Margot, is that it actually smells like what we call a spice box. So if you've ever been to an Indian restaurant or I don't know, maybe you have this like, you know, you bought this on eBay and you've got it like, you know, in your house, you know, as a decoration. But you can buy something that used to contain all these spices. And when you open it up, it really does smell like, you know, cardamom, cumin, seeds, you know, all kinds of other dried spices. And this is kind of very much what the margot smells like, has a lot of that in the aroma. And I think it works actually very, very well with this dish. You even get a lot of that kind of spicy quality in the flavor, you know. And this is from the 15 vintage, which was a really excellent vintage. It's not a green wine at all. It's actually quite round and it's very, very supple. And it seems to go pretty seamlessly, I think, with the food. It's a really interesting herbal combination. So yeah, the spice flavors in the Indian food are definitely present. The wine on its own tastes like classic Bordeaux, how I think of it. Together, the wine kind of has a cola quality, like it picks up some of those herbs. It's really neat. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. There's definitely a, like a sweet spice kind of character going on. When I tasted them together, as soon as Barb mentioned cardamom, I was like, that's exactly what I'm tasting, as I'm swishing the wine around in my mouth after tasting the food. I'll say this was a very interesting pairing because Margot is one of my favorite Appalachians within Bordeaux, and I love them because they can be so kind of like, they're red fruit forward, they're spicy. I think, again, going back to the idea of picking out flavors in the wine and picking out flavors in the food and trying to match those together, this actually ended up working out really, really well. What approach have we not taken today? We've done we've done kind of matching weight and intensity with the Pad Thai and Ridge Zinfandel. We've done kind of consistency with flavor in terms of bringing out different kind of herbs and spices that the food has that will bring out in the wine. Yeah. We've talked a little bit about compare and contrast as well. The one that a lot of people tend to think about and does typically work very well, which just fundamentally doesn't quite work here, is if it grows together, it goes together. And there is a, at least in the American market, there's a very big shortage of Thai, Indian and Korean wines on the market. If you are trying to do wine and food pairing, the grows together, goes together mentality, meaning if you have food that is indicative of a particular region and then you grab a wine from the same area, there should be kind of a natural pairing going on. And for the most part, that does work. I mean, as long as you're following some of the other ideas, you can't always just say if they eat it here, their wine has to work well because inevitably there will be something that's just crazy off, spicy or way too light and the wine washes it away. But for the most part, yeah, that is a good way of judging what wines are gonna work. So if you're ever in a liquor store, if you're in a Binny's, you can feel free to ask one of us. But if you're ever in a strange liquor store and you're not sure where to go, if you can find the aisle that has wine that matches your food in terms of origin, it's a great starting point. It's a good rule of thumb. Yeah. It's exciting here that we're doing such non-traditional wine pairings, stuff I never would have thought of. Because like I said, it throws one of those options out the window, unless you have access to a Southeast Asian Cabernet, which I don't think we do. You would know better than me, Barb. I don't think we do. But the other thing is that there is wine produced, like for instance, in a lot of parts of Mexico, there's wine in India now, there's wine in China. But the wines that are being produced, particularly like in India and China are all very, very new wineries. So that may go a little bit against the old tradition of matching wine and food because they don't really have the history. Those wines really weren't produced there like a hundred years ago to match with their food. Yeah, they're really being produced there to satisfy demand for good wine in those countries. I hear the Chinese are trying to make Marcellin, their grape. Marcellin? Marcellin. What the heck is that? Yeah. Well, it's a black grape. I know what that is, but for Greg's benefit, if we could please explain that grape. Yeah. I mean, they're experimenting with it kind of all over the world right now with climate change. Some new plantations in California have just started. It's approved now in Bordeaux or is in that discussion. The Bioneaux is looking at in terms of the new varieties that they're going to approve. So I think that incentivized to a lot of Cali producers, but pretty hardy, heat tolerant grape variety. Wow. Is it a new crossing of other grapes or is it just something that hasn't seen a lot of spotlight in the past? I think it's a hybrid, but I don't know for sure. I mean, it's got to be a cross. I'm sure it's a crossing of something. I don't think it's a hybrid because I think by law, AOC law in France, you can't play in hybrids. But surely, it's a- Hold on. Is it like Merlot and something? Well, what were the other grapes that were just recently approved for use in Bordeaux that are not traditional? They're approved, but you have to understand. You know who's going to use them. It's going to be the entry level. Yeah. I mean, they're like 6,200 out of 6,600 wineries in Bordeaux pretty much are like in the Altair du Mer, most of them. It's like their Central Valley, although it's very different because it's Hale and L'Oreal and that. But certain producers there may end up putting in some of those grape varieties just because a lot of them are producing wine that they're going to sell to a cooperative or a company for like a year old of court, you know. Okay. So. We're not talking about anything that you've ever heard of before. So I'm not going to suddenly have Tempranillo in my Lafite. Not in your lifetime. So Jances Robinson in her book on index on grape varieties, she dubs Marcellin as one of the most successful, relatively recent French crosses. It's a cross of Cabernet Sauvignon and Grenache, which was just done in 1961. So yeah, there you have it. Cool. All right. Sorry. Good episode and we didn't even have to pad tie it out. Oh. Well done. Thanks for having me guys. Thank you. You read a lot of good things to say. Yeah. Thanks for coming on Scott, giving us your culinary background here and Barb, thanks for proving everyone wrong here with these red wines pairing very nicely. Well, I hope I did help prove some. I hope I did give a little bit of a different impression on some of these wines. So don't be afraid to drink red wine with strange or unusual or hot foods. I agree. I mean, well said. There wasn't a bad one here. No. This opened my eyes quite a bit. They all sounded kind of scary at the end, but yeah, these were all great. I'm not going to lie. I got the email about what pairings we were going to be looking at. And I was like, I need to redo some research. I've not paired these reds with these foods before. Hold on a second. They let you know what was going to happen ahead of time because I didn't get that courtesy. Greg, every time you do a wine episode, you say, well, I'm going to be the dumb guy in the room. Yeah. So we just left it that way. Right. Great. Cool. Mission accomplished. Wasn't that hard. All right. Well, thank you all. Thanks for the food and wine. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Until next time, I'm Alicia. I'm Greg. I'm Scott. I'm Barbara. And keep tasting. Sweet. Can I eat more food now? Yeah. Does that go in after the credit music plays? Just Greg going, can I eat more? Yes. Well, it does now. Thanks. I know. Great suggestion. I don't know who's editing this, but please do that.