Fancy some bull's blood?
I couldn’t have chosen a worse day to take two colleagues out for lunch at Veda, an underrated restaurant at Connaught Place, Delhi, that serves great kebabs but gets noticed only because it was designed by couture sultan Rohit Bal. It was a bad day because the rain gods decided to shower their bounty on the capital, and, because Delhi just can’t handle rain, the city was wallowing in misery.
But when you’re with two lovely, lively women who are discovering the pleasures of married life, and there’s a decent Spanish wine—the Sangre de Toro from Torres—to keep everyone happy, the heavens can empty themselves out! Of course, I can’t share the delicious gossip exchanged across the table, but I must tell you that the lunch confirmed my view that fruit-forward red wines can dance along with meaty kebabs and toneddown curries.
The Sangre de Toro is a light-tomedium-bodied, ruby red wine—it owes its name, which means ‘bull’s blood’, to its robust colour. It’s hard to find a young wine looking so definitively red. To drive home the point, each bottle comes with a miniature of a charging bull suspended from a red-and-white ribbon.
The grapes that go into the wine are Garnacha, Carinena and Syrah, which have been grown in Catalunya since the time of the Roman emperor Augustus. The people who produce the grapes may have never heard about India—though Miguel Torres, who’s seen as an iconoclast among Spain’s winemakers, has been visiting India every year—but the fruit of their labour made our lunch more memorable than what we had expected it to be.
We had ordered a threecourse platter that opened with kebabs—we settled for the Peshawari lamb kebabs and gilafi seekh kebabs, which have earned the name from their quilt of finely-chopped bell peppers, tomatoes and onions. What followed was my favourite dish at Veda, murgh hara pyaaz masala—the chicken is cooked in a creamy, lightly-spiced gravy with chopped stalks of green onions (my nonvegetarian colleague— the vegetarian only had Carlsberg—had asked for chicken handi lazeez, a silken treat that deserves its name). To complete the treat, we got the gentlest, the most satisfying maa ki dal we have ever had.
It’s hard to get one wine to agree with different elements of a meal—it goes against received wisdom. But Sangre de Toro, a great wine for all occasions (had it been French or Italian, it would have been priced much more than the Rs 2,250 plus VAT that we were charged for a bottle), just got along with the meal as if it were some old friend. Its exuberant aroma, the sensuality of its spicy notes made time seem to stand still.
That’s the quality of a great wine. It’s like being in a casino. You lose track of time. And if there’s a downpour outside, you have another reason not to venture out and keep the gossip going. The wine, say the tasting notes on the Torres website, goes well with stuffed peppers, game and meat dishes with spicy or sweet-and-sour sauces.
I know why this delightfully ripe red wine from Spain got along with Veda’s murgh hara pyaaz masala. It’s the sweet-andsour quality of the gravy. Now, did anyone say you should never order red wine with chicken?
