Wine at Spice Temple: Not boring
December 29th, 2008. Posted by luane
The marriage of wine and food at Chinese restaurants has nearly always been an afterthought. Wine lists are rarely given much thought, and whether the selections match up with the food is questionable at best. But to have a great restaurant, you need to have a great wine list. This doesn’t mean it needs to be huge, but it needs to offer value, selection and interest. And the wines should work with the food.
Realising this, we set out to create a wine program that was different than those at most restaurants, much less Chinese restaurants. We could have cranked out another run of the mill wine list, but instead we decided to have some fun with it and set up a few goals:
- We wanted the list to be big enough to offer a wide variety of wines, but not so big that you couldn’t get through it and make a selection within a few minutes at most.
- Every wine had to go with the food. This sounds simple enough, but the style of food and ingredients made some wines unworkable, such as tannic Bordeaux wines, high alcohol wines or extremely light and delicate wines.
- We wanted to have wines available at every price level, from inexpensive to celebratory (ie, not cheap).
- To keep things interesting, we thought we’d balance out the list with about half Australian wines and half from the rest of the world.
- We put in a “glass half full” structure, not meaning that we look at life positively all the time, but rather that many of the wines are available by the glass, half bottle and full bottle.
In order to accomplish this, we decided that we were going to limit the wine list to exactly 100 wines. Why 100? Well, it’s a nice round number, and we could just fit 50 wines on a single sheet of A4, thus giving us a two page wine list.
This decision had a big impact on choosing the wines, much more so than we thought initially. First, it really makes you focus on what you are selecting. You can’t just throw another Shiraz on the list without getting rid of something else. Wines that were so-so or not quite good enough got booted off. Wines that really went well with the food, such as Pinot Noirs, got more space, while Cabernets received less.
Through numerous taste trials with the food, we also figured out that in general white wines work better with most of the menu selections. And you get the benefit of cold white wine cooling you off after a big chilli hit if you ordered one of the more spicy plates. So, the list is somewhat biased towards whites and sparkling wines (about 60/40), although we have what we think is a great selection of reds that really work well with many of the dishes.
When you come into Spice Temple, you’ll see our philosophy printed on the front of the wine list. It’s exactly 100 words, so you can read it quickly. It sums up how we feel about wine’s place in our restaurant: something to have fun with and to enjoy, and to make your experience at Spice Temple that much better.
David Doyle
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Tags: Asian, Spice Temple
