I like cake, and I like wines. So when company director Glen from Cake Wines contacted me, I was listening. I thought that they would make wines which were inspired by cakes (I know you're all laughing but I'd try those wines). As it turns out, Cake Wines is a boutique wine company making wines from the Adelaide Hills. You can find out more about them via this really cool video.
Glen told me about a program they have running called MATCHED.
MATCHED is an idea that’s about exploring “kitchens that don’t live in the limelight”, sharing stories from the chefs that run them, and giving some much needed love, and exposure, to the restaurants, cafes, tapas/wine bars and gastro pubs that sometimes get drowned out in our celebrity driven food world. Throughout July-Aug-Sept 2014 we're launching a campaign to promote these unsung heroes by asking them to match their favourite dishes to our wines, served up for you to enjoy!
I was asked whether I wanted to try out this MATCHED experience, which I accepted. I chose to go to Charlie Dumpling.
So the MATCHED dish at Charlie Dumpling was their Thai Spiced Salmon dumplings in yellow curry with the Cake Wines Pinot Gris. Firstly, the Pinot Gris was really good. So refreshing with a bit of sweetness and really clean in flavour. It did actually match well with the salmon dumplings. According to my amateur wine tastebuds, I felt like the wine brought out the lemongrass flavour of the dish. The wine also really worked well with the Kingfish Sashimi with fennel and apple. We also had the Peking Duck dumplings, which I liked but my friend felt the sauce was a bit strange.
What we did agree on was the addictive Charlie's Fried Chicken Ribs with five spice, honey and kewpie. The batter was so good and the flavours were great. The meat was still tender. A dish I would definitely recommend you try. Not as successful was the Thai Papaya Salad, where the flavours were not very good so I would avoid that.
The dessert menu consists of more dumplings, but sweet ones. We tried the Milk Chocolate Dumplings with raspberry chili sorbet and the Peanut Butter Mochi with honeycomb and salted chocolate. The milk dumplings were great, but neither of us were fans of the raspberry chili sorbet. The peanut butter mochi sounded better on paper as the flavours didn't really shine through.
All up, it was a good meal. Our waitress was wonderful and really nice, helpful and funny. We had some nice food matched with the tasty Cake Wines wine. You can check out the Cake Wines website to see what MATCHED dishes they are doing around town and go check it out.
