Charles Metcalfe is one of the best-known, most spontaneous and amusing wine critics in Britain. Charles is here this afternoon to talk about curry, one of the nations favourite foods, and how we can find the perfect wine to complement it.

Charles starts us off by introducing some of his favourite wines

I've got 4 wines from Alsace here, from 4 of the most important grape varieties. We've got a Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, a Pinot Blanc and a Riesling. So without further ado.... I'm starting with this Pinot Gris. It comes from a co-operative Beblenheim and it shows the gentle honeyed side of Pinot Gris, quite a creamy feel to it. Nice acidity, not too challenging but a gentle easy-going wine. That one is £9.50 from Nicolas.

The 2nd one is a Gewurztraminer which is probably the most famous of the Alsace grapes. Gewurz is always a much more fragrant style. This one is much more successful, rose petals, lychee, very fragrant. But still, all that aroma supported by lovely acidity. That is from the Turckheim co-operative and under a Sainsburys label it's £6.99 a bottle.

The next wine is a Pinot Blanc. You might expect that Pinot Blanc would be less rich, less intense than Pinot Gris but this one comes from a very good grower. It's from a grower called Marcel Deiss. It has a very toffee nose, very rich, it's a sumptuous wine - lovely acidity. Rich and quite fat but balanced by this lovely steely acidity. Costs £8.99 from Oddbins.

And our first question comes from Barney:

Whenever I go for a curry with my friends they automatically order beer as they say wine doesn’t go with curry. Is this true or just a tired old cliché?

Charles said:

Barney - personally I don't think beer goes with curry at all. The major problem is that beer tends to be lager and lager is quite fizzy. I've always found that fizzy drinks, whether its lager or coca-cola or champagne, actually accentuate the effect of chilli. So your mouth feels as if it's even more on fire than it would otherwise. On the other hand, white wine, particularly dry white wine or off-dry white wine does work very well with the enormous number of dishes and the styles of cooking you find on the indian sub-continent. Alsace wines work very well. One of the most important reasons is that it shows you the name of the grape variety on the bottle so you always know roughly what the flavour inside will be. That's terribly useful in actually trying to match a dish, whether it's from India or anywhere else.

Barry wants to know:

I do like my curries hot but tend to drink beer as I need to cool my mouth, are there any wines that are good at cooling you down when eating a fiery curry?

Charles said:

Barry - I find that beer doesn't really help the effect of cooling down chilli. If that's really all you want to do with whatever you're drinking you'll find that Lassi (made from yoghurt) is a far more effective cooling mechanism. I drink wine with indian food because I think the flavours go together better than with beer and I tend to go for dry or off-dry white wines.

Marguerite wants to know:

Hi Charles, when choosing wines to accompany a curry is it as simple as the traditional red wine with red meat, white wine with fish or white approach?

Charles said:

I don't think the traditional "red with meat and white with fish" is a satisfactory approach anyway. Life is more complicated! It's certainly more complicated when you get in to the very imaginative and exotic mixes of spice that you find in indian cooking. I think that red wine is very rarely successful with indian food. The problem is that the tannin in red wine clashes with the chilli and it makes the wine taste more tannic and the food taste hotter, which for me is not the right answer. You can use red wine occasionally but they have to be very light - a very light Pinot Noir would work but it wouldn't be my first choice. White wine is definitely better and the wines that go best tend to be dry, off-dry and quite fragrant but you really have to adapt the wine to the flavours of the spicing in the dish(es) that you're eating.

Maureen wants to know:

I'm a bit of a coward and only go for the milder curries? Won't the floweriness of the Alsace wines overpower the mild dishes like Korma?

Charles said:

Not all Alsace wines are flowery. Gewurztraminer is very flowery, very fragrant. Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc are richer, more honeyed and not really flowery at all. Riesling can be honeyed, can be appley, can be flowery but that's not the first adjective I would think of. I would say that with a Korma, with its creamy gentle sauce, the right kind of wine would be something like an Alsace Pinot Blanc or Pinot Gris because there you have quite a richly textured wine that goes well with the creamy sauce in a Korma.

Carla wants to know:

I'm a vegetarian and love the southern indian 'thali' dishes made up of many small vegetarian dishes as opposed to the traditional meat curry and rice brigade. What wines should I be going for to complement my dishes?

Charles said:

I think the Thali is a very civilised way of eating because it gives you a lot of small dishes to try without being overwhelmed by one - a bit like Spanish Tapas. It depends what dishes you're trying - a good bridging wine for a lot of vegetarian dishes would be something like an Alsace Pinot Blanc or Riesling.

Nayim wants to know:

My favourite part of a traditional indian meal is the dessert. Are there any sweet wines that can live with the extreme sweetness of them?

Charles said:

Of course it depends whether you've been drinking all through the meal what you want to drink at the end of it. Good sweet wines tend to be amongst the most expensive of wines because they're the most expensive to produce. Alsace does have wonderful sweet wines. Bearing in mind that indian sweet dishes are, as you say, very very sweet I would say that the style you have to go for is what the Alsatians call the Selection des Grains Nobles. These are wines made from grapes affected by Noble Rot, which concentrates the liquid inside the individual grapes and when they are picked and fermented there is far less liquid but a much higher proportion of sugar and acidity. But they are very expensive and quite difficult to find. Otherwise, you really have to think about matching the level of your sweetness with correspondingly sweet wine.

Andrew Hill wants to know:

I like a "hot curry". In my experience red's don't work. Can you suggest a really good white to go with a lamb or beef hot dish?

Charles said:

I entirely agree with you about reds not working. The tannins in red wine tend to emphasize the heat of the chilli and the toughness of the tannins. The best white with a lamb or beef hot dish - I might be tempted to go with a Gewurztraminer because it is a richer style of wine. It's got a fatter feel and it has this wonderful exotic spicy character that can cope with some pretty exotic spice mixes. But if you felt that you don't like that very fragrant style, I'd probably go with an Alsace Pinot Gris.

Gayle wants to know:

How about red wine with curry? Particularly pinotage, good idea or not??

Charles said:

Pinotages tend to have quite firm tannins and that isn't an aspect of red wine that I think works very well with the chilli in curry. I would go with one of the parents of Pinotage - Pinot Noir. Particularly a very light style of Pinot Noir such as comes from Alsace or Sancerre because I think the flavours are right but you need to avoid those tough tannins.

Arabella Woodrow MW wants to know:

Charles, I like Alsace wines too but these days find they are often too sweet for most savoury dishes?

Charles said:

Arabella - nice to hear from you. I find (and I think you'll probably agree with this) that someone who really knows about wine probably knows which producers make dry wines and which producers have been led down the seductive trail of letting their wines out rather sweeter than used to be the case. The other point I would make is that some indian dishes have a bit of sweetness from tamarind and many chutneys also have a lot of sweetness in them. In that case, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a wine with a bit of residual sugar because it can actually balance the sweetness in the dish, or chutney.

Andy wants to know:

I like a good chicken tikka dansak and would like to know a good wine that would go with this. i like red or white wine.

Charles said:

Andy, the problem here is that I don't know how you or your restaurant or your supermarket actually spice their dhansak. Technically dhansak means "with some lentils in the sauce". It's sometimes a bit sweet, perhaps with some fruit in it but sometimes entirely savoury. If it has some sweetness in it I think you could go for something like a slightly off-dry Pinot Gris from Alsace. If it's dry I'd stick with Pinot Gris but make sure it was a dry one. That is the chicken tikka dhansak that I've had recently - you might find that you put different spices in and would prefer different flavours in your wine.

Georgie wants to know:

We like to order lots of indian dishes and share. Are there any Alsace wines that will serve as all-rounders?

Charles said:

Georgie - of course there are. It rather depends whether you like a softer, gentler style of wine and those are the kind of dishes that you've got, or whether you've got dishes with quite a bit of acidity in them and prefer a brisker, more refreshing wine. If you are going for the softer style I would suggest Pinot Blanc as being the right wine. If it's a crisper, more refreshing wine you're looking for, with higher acidity, the answer is Riesling.

Anna wants to know:

There has been an explosion in the growth of fusion restaurants mixing indian and western styles, this turns many of the old rules on their heads so how do we choose wine that suits this new cuisine?

Charles said:

Anna, I think you're absolutely right. Some of the most exciting indian restaurants, particularly in London, are ones that have taken traditional indian spicing and taken on board the repertoire of Western European cooking. It's an interesting reversal of the usual rules, where the Western European cooking brings in cooking from the East. When it comes to matching wine and food it's more than ever a matter of actually looking at the particular ingredients of a dish. If you haven't got the recipe in front of you it's going to be jolly difficult to do until you're actually eating it and can tell what the dominant flavours are. So you just have to approximate if you're in a restaurant. Buy wine by the glass where you can and hope that you have a waiter who actually knows what's in the food. Very often you don't. Of course if you're cooking at home with a recipe in front of you, you can guess at what are going to be the dominant flavours in any dish and buy appropriate wines. Remember there are certain basic rules to follow - it's a good idea to match acidity in a dish with acidity in a wine. The same for sugar - if you've got a dish with a bit of sweetness it needs a bit of sweetness in the wine. If it's a very powerful dish with very intense flavours, you have to serve a wine of a comparable intensity otherwise it'll just be blown away. I hope that's helpful but in these days of fusion cooking it's very much a matter of making it up as you go along.

Claire wants to know:

What is your favourite wine and curry combination?

Charles said:

I had a brilliant one Claire, the other day, when I was thinking about these four wines. It was a dish with curd cheese cooked with quite gentle spices and a bit of red pepper and spinach and that, matched with this 2001 Riesling, was just brilliant. It's very difficult to generalise because every wine is different and any indian friend of yours will tell you that the spicing used in any dish varies from one cooking to the next so good luck!

Angie43 wants to know:

Would you ever order a meal second, after deciding on what wine you have chosen first?

Charles said:

As a wine person it quite often happens that I have a particular wine I want to serve and I decide what I'm going to cook based on what I know will go with that wine. Frankly, in an indian restaurant, with a few honourable exceptions, the wine lists are not what dictate the pattern the meal will follow but I could imagine that in a good restaurant with an exceptional wine list it might just happen that I would choose the wine first. It's more likely to be the other way round though.

Nellie wants to know:

Why do Alsace wines go particularly well with Asian cuisines?

Charles said:

I think one of the reasons Nellie is that most Alsace wines are white and white wines are much better with all Asian cuisines than red. Further than that, quite a few of the Asian cuisines - indian but more Thai and Chinese cuisines have a certain amount of sweetness built into the recipes and so you don't necessarily want a completely dry wine. Alsace wines are very often off-dry and that helps balance the sweetness in the recipes. In addition, Riesling, which is to my way of thinking the greatest variety in Alsace, is an incredibly versatile grape. It can do bone dry wines through off-dry up to lusciously sweet wines and all of them have a lovely spine of acidity which balances any acidity in any of the sauces. So that works with a lot of styles of Asian cuisine - particuarly with fish. Riesling works very well with ginger, which you find a lot in indian and Chinese cooking.

Bryan wants to know:

Would you ever have a sparkling wine with a curry?

Charles said:

I probably wouldn't, because I find that sparkling drinks emphasise the chilli in a curry. I think the most interesting things about a curry are the other spices and ingredients. I don't object to chilli but it's not the most interesting thing about the dish, for me and I find it gets a bit fiercer with any kind of sparkling wine or lager or indeed sparkling water.

Jules wants to know:

Are these ( Alsace) wines available in restaurants or only supermarkets?

Charles said:

You'll find Alsace wines in the large branches of all supermarkets. You'll find them in Off Licence chains such as Oddbins, Thresher, Majestic and in local independent specialist wine merchants. And of course you'll find them on good restaurant wine lists. With the joys of the internet now available, some restaurants have websites where you can actually look at the wine list before going to the restaurant and many supermarkets have web-based sales opportunities where you can see whether they have Alsace wines available.

Charlie wants to know:

How do I recognise Alsace wines?

Charles said:

Well, to start with, don't forget that Alsace is part of France. There have been times when it has been part of Germany but only in times of conflict. So, look in the France section if wines are divided by country in your local supermarket or wine merchants. Secondly, Alsace wines are always bottled in tall, slim bottles. That might lead you to confuse them with German wines but you shouldn't find German wines in the French section. Thirdly, you will always see somewhere on the label, maybe in small letters - Produce of France.

Imogen wants to know:

"Best wine to drink with vegetarian curry?"

Charles said:

Imogen it really depends what you've got in your curry. Does it have tomato in it and need a higher acid wine? In which case I would suggest Alsace Riesling. Is it a softer, smoother, creamier style? In that case I would go for Pinot Gris or Pinot Blanc. Coconut too is a pointer towards Pinot Gris and Pinot Blanc.

Sophie wants to know:

What does 'full bodied' mean?

Charles said:

From a wine point of view Sophie, it means a wine of high alcohol and a rich mouth feel.

Harv wants to know:

How can you experiment with what wines work well with curries when your taste buds aren't working at thier best while eating a curry?

Charles said:

Harv, research done in the States, where of course they're more likely to meet chilli in Mexican rather than indian food, suggests that chilli doesn't actually affect your sense of taste. Or perhaps I should say that it doesn't affect your sense of smell, since a good deal of what happens when we think we're tasting is actually smelling. I think that red wines don't work well with indian food because they accentuate the feel of chilli but white wines don't get nearly as badly affected so you can concentrate on matching the other flavours in the dish with the flavours in your white wine. It is possible, believe me - I've done a lot of experimenting!