For my first wine dinner blog, my friend and I decided to find a wine pairing for salmon bowls, a meal we eat often. Since we had to create a three-course meal, we decided to have dumplings for our appetizers, and because we couldn't find mochi at the grocery store, we settled on lemon pie... (not that good).
Let's start with our appetizer. We got these delicious dumplings from the grocery store and paired them with a 2023 Josh Chardonnay. We first tasted the wine by itself, and it had fruity notes of citrus and pear/peach. It was overall very refreshing and also had subtle woody flavors like oak. The dumplings we had were pork and vegetable with a soy sauce-based dipping sauce. When we tried them together, we felt like the wine took down the saltiness of the soy sauce and brought out the sweeter flavors of the wine, making it more refreshing and less acidic, although it was pretty light to begin with.
2023 Josh Chardonnay
Pork & Vegetable dumplings with the wine
For our main course, we had salmon bowls consisting of salmon, rice, cucumber, mango, crunchy onions, and spicy mayo. The wine we paired with this course was a 2024 Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc. On its own, the wine had strong, fresh-grassy notes as well as citrus (lemon) and tropical fruits. We felt like the wine brought out the salmon flavor and paired well with the grassy flavors from the wine. Overall, it was a very fresh pairing and we felt that both the wine and meal complimented each other.
2024 Kim Crawford Sauvignon Blanc
Salmon bowls
For our dessert, we were hoping to stay on theme and try some mochi for dessert, but we couldn't find any and decided to try something different, a lemon pie. I have never had lemon pie before, so this was an interesting experiment. We decided to pair this with a Lamarca Prosecco (we could not find a vintage on the bottle). When we tried the Prosecco by itself, we felt it was very refreshing, with fruity notes of citrus as well as pear and strong flavors of apple. We felt that it brought out the lemon flavors very well. The pie was not very good on its own, but the citrus flavors from the Prosecco helped strengthen the weaker artificial lemon flavors from the pie. The Prosecco cut the sweetness of the pie and made it more refreshing. We also tried it with whipped cream as well and I felt that it made it sweeter but it started to overpower the Prosecco flavors.
Lamarca Prosecco
Our very sad lemon pie
Overall, I think we definitely could have made this more cohesive, but we really wanted to surround it with our favorite dinner. I don't think that the Sauvignon Blanc was the absolute best pairing with our entree, but it was alright. The pairings for the appetizer and dessert were much better, and I would try them again (with a better pie; this was so bad).
Here is us enjoying our dinner and wine together
Me with each of the wines
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