Southwestern-style cooking brims with flavors that are too bold or fiery for many wines. Any sommelier with a lick of sense will tell you that the wrong wine pairing can make spicy dishes spicier and bitter accents too bitter. But it’s not a hopeless cause. First, check the label for alcohol content. A general rule of thumb is, the lower the alcohol content, the better the match the wine is going to be with food. This goes double for spicy food. Look for 13 percent or less alcohol content. Among white wines, Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris have a good balance of fruit and acid to match Southwestern flavors.
2002 Lingenfelder Bird-Label Riesling, $14. This tall, elegant bottle is billed as having "lots of mineral notes." It is most definitely one juicy little drink. Flowery and perfumy (imagine a perfume made of peaches and lime), it had too much residual sugar for two of our tasters. Yet for a third sipper, it worked nicely to take the edge off the heat of the jalapeno peppers. In the final analysis, this might be deemed one very round wine in an elongated bottle.
2004 Elena Walch Pinot Bianco Alto Adige, $17. We all had high hopes for this Pinot from the northeastern region of Italy known as Alto Adige, famous for its white wines bursting with individuality. The advance talk about how wondrous the wine is on its own as an aperitif had us waiting eagerly; its lovely straw color only upped the anticipation. Alas, upon a first sip, noses wrinkled and lips curled. One taster even spit his out. The finish on this Pinot Bianco was of fruit and nuts after their prime. Taken along with bites of stuffed jalapeno peppers, the wine lost any semblance of remaining integrity and began to taste watery.
2004 Chateau Lafont Menaut Bordeaux, Pessac-Leognan, $12. As is so often the case, the French came through with an unbelievably inexpensive specimen of the perfect stuff, made from 100 percent Sauvignon Blanc grapes. For once, the phrase "penetrating minerals" is not a fabrication. This Bordeaux is at once delicate and bold, refined and racy. There is something lemony and cleansing about it. It disappeared long before anything else on the table, leaving us bereft that we didn’t have more and had to settle for lesser grapes.
— MW
