The WINE CLUB you've been waiting for!!

May 18, 2024

Hi Wine Friends,

Hope you’re enjoying this glorious weather and finding lots of time to sip wine in the sunshine. I just enjoyed my first patio meal (roast chicken and arugula salad with a crisp Chablis and refreshing Fleurie from Beaujolais) and it was just what my soul needed.

I had the pleasure of sitting down this week with Holly Ong, owner of Sibeiho - a line of flavor-packed Singaporean sambal sauces - to explore pairing wine with spicy flavors. I also visited one of my favorite wine shops - Cru & Domaine - to take part in a super fun wine activity they offer.

And what else? Oh yeah - I'm launching a wine club!

Read on…

Love Spicy? Meet Sibeiho

Holly Ong founded Sibeiho, a Portland-based Singaporean food startup, to bring the vibrant tastes of Singapore to Oregon. Raised in Singapore on her mother’s traditional cooking, Holly developed Sibehio as a supperclub which then evolved into a line of sambal sauces, with a fusion of Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Nonya culinary influences.

Her three signature sambals follow family recipes and use all-natural , locally-sourced ingredients. Each one packs a punch of flavor and heat, but are different in their own ways. I thought they would be a fun challenge to pair wine with, since chili spice calls for specific characteristics in a wine.

See, when you have a spicy dish, you want a wine with lots of acidity and maybe a little residual sugar. The acid and also the sweetness (if you go that route) cut through the heat and make it burn less. You don’t have to go full dessert wine, but this is the time to pull out the off-dry wines - those with just a few grams of residual sugar remaining. What you want to avoid at all cost are wines with high levels of tannin and/or alcohol. Both will enhance (rather than subdue) the heat of the dish and make the wine taste bitter!

Here is what we paired

BOOMZ SAMBAL: Holly calls this the ‘eat with everything’ sambal and frecommends it with rice, pasta, omelettes, burgers, pizza, avocado toast… so yeah, everything. With a base of shrimp paste, dried chilis and garlic, it's a total umami bomb of heat and lip-smacking yum. I paired this with a sparkling Gamay from Jean Paul Brun, an excellent producer in Beaujolais. It’s made in the Methode Ancestrale (akin to pet-nat) and is low in alcohol (around 8%) with the remaining residual grape sugar left unfermented. The result is a lightly fizzy, lightly sweet, totally refreshing delight that tastes of raspberries and rose petal. When pairedl, the wine tasted less sweet and the sambal less spicy. Rather, the pairing enhanced the caramelized notes of the sauce and the fruitiness of the wine. I could have put this sauce on shrimp fried rice and drank the whole bottle! #dangerous

OMG! SAMBAL: This one is concentrated and nutty, with lots of rich flavors reminiscent of sun-dried tomatoes. Holly recommends using OMG! as a base for stews, marinades, dipping sauces and stir fries. Since it has such concentrated flavor, I paired it with a more structured wine - one with high acidity but no residual sugar. And because orange wines tend to pair so well with garlicky, tangy flavors, I chose a skin-fermented Listan Blanco from the Canary Islands. Fermenting white grapes on their skins (which results in orange wine) emphasizes the aromatics of the grapes and gives the wine more body. The skin-contact here popped aromas of tangerine and kumquat, with just a hint of salted marcona almond. The acidity in the wine turned down the heat of the sambal and the rich, deep flavors in the sauce actually lessened the funkiness in the wine and made the sweet citrus notes shine through. A fun pairing!

AF CHILI CHUNKA SAMBAL: Because this sauce has vinegar, it's brighter and tangier - like an elevated sriracha. Holly recommends enjoying it with anything braised, fried or generally decadent, because the high acid cuts through richness. To pair, I chose a wine with equally high acidity: German Riesling - a Mosel Valley with around 9g of residual sugar (to balance the high levels of acidity due to the cold climate). It was packed with stone fruit notes of peach, nectarine and just-ripe apricot, with floral notes of jasmine and gardenia and that signature petrol note that Riesling tends to express when grown in rocky soils. We loved how the brightness of the wine matched the tanginess of the sauce, and left your mouth watering for more. And the subtle sweetness balanced the samba’s heat perfectly.

I hope you’ll all go find Holly’s amazing sambals and try these pairings for yourself. They are available online as well as locally in the Portland area at New Seasons and Market of Choice. I can already tell these jars are going to disappear very quickly in my kitchen 😳

Brushing Up on Blind Tasting

Blind tasting is one of my very favorite wine-related activities. It’s not only a lot of fun but also a great barometer to see where your palate is strong and where it needs practice.

I love leading blind tasting seminars because people are always shocked at how much they can detect from the wine, even without extensive (or any!) previous wine knowledge. Blind tasting is about using your senses to play detective and gather clues about the wine. Then, as you develop a bank of knowledge on regions and grapes, you can make educated guesses about what the wine might be.

If you want a full rundown on the Deductive Tasting Method, you’ll find it in my course Seven Day Sommelier. I have a whole module teaching blind tasting, which you can then apply to every wine you taste in the future! (or that we taste together in the new wine club? 🤷‍♀️)

But I’m writing all this not to promote myself but, rather, one of best new wine shops in town - Cru & Domaine. Located in Slabtown, Cru & Domaine not only carries an incredible selection of retail wines, they also pour rare and reserve offerings by the glass and they just started offering blind tastings!

Every Tuesday, the whole day (11am - 7pm), you can stop in and ask to blind taste (three whites or three reds for $20 or all six for $35). They will set you up with a tasting sheet, along with handy guides on aromatics and clues to look for. Then you can talk about your answers with David or Marisa - the shop’s very talented proprietors, both advanced sommeliers! They are approachable, kind and genuinely passionate about wine, and I learn something every time I taste with them.

Watch my blind tasting at Cru & Domaine here 😉

Wine Club Is Here!

Y’all have been asking and I am SO thrilled to finally launch a monthly wine tasting club! If you were around during the pandemic (shout out to my OG Instagram crew!), you’ll know that I did a weekly live wine tasting every Sunday for two years.

I’ve been looking for a way to bring it back and I'm so excited it's finally here!

The monthly club is $100 and includes two bottles of wine delivered to your door* and a zoom call on the third Sunday of each month to taste them together. If you’d like to add extra bottles to drink in your own time, we have that option too.

This club is not intended to replace my course but, rather, to work in tandem with it. You can learn all the contextual knowledge in Seven Day Sommelier and then meet me once a month in the Zoom-a-verse to put the knowledge into practice! It’s also a great excuse to enjoy wine together as a community and it promises to be a whole lot of fun.

I hope you’ll join me! To be a part of June's club, sign up by May 31st.

*As of now, the club is only available to the Portland metro area but plan to expand soon!

JOIN THE WINE CLUB

I’ll see you next week - writing to you from the Isle of Santorini! Stay tuned for all the tea on Greek wine, Greek food and Greek boys - er - boats.

Cheers,

Kelsey

The WINE CLUB you've been waiting for!!

Hi Wine Friends,

Love Spicy? Meet Sibeiho

I HAVE A FREE GIFT FOR YOU...

Want to PAIR WINES like a Pro?