Perfect wine pairing for Zankou Chicken?

So if you live in Hollywood, you’ve probably crossed paths with Zankou Chicken, a Lebanese joint that serves some of the finest, most fattening spit-roasted, garlic-laden poultry this side of…this side of Sepulveda. Anyhow, Zankou Chicken is pretty cheap, like stuff your face for under $6 cheap. But does that mean it deserves to be paired with an equally easy-on-the-wallet wine? Let’s find out!

Our pairing with this decadent Middle Eastern fare? One of our favorite Sonoma producers, Pax Cellars, and their 2005 white Rhone “Venus” cuvée, which is 100% Roussanne from Bennett Valley. The only retailer listing the wine on Wine-Searcher is a place in Georgia (?), for $75. We paid closer to $60 direct from the winery, though our memory is a little fuzzy.

The nose on the wine is very rich — buttery and honeyed. Not surprisingly, the winery notes say this was aged in 40% new French oak, and this could indeed be a victim of the Vaynerchuk Oak Monster. It almost smells botryitis-y, but is clearly isn’t a sweet wine. Nearside of cloying on the nose, still.

And not much different on the palate. We’re not sure we’ve developed a taste for Rousanne, or whether it’s just this Rousanne that’s bothering us (as we’ve read, Rousanne is meant to be a little more on the acidic side and this wine is anything but). We don’t get the figs or the honeydew suggested by the winery notes, but rather a little bit of petrol (which we’ve tasted in spades in certain Rieslings) and maybe a teeny tiny bit of candied ginger (wish there was more of the latter).

Of course, the real purpose of this whole experiment is to try the food and wine together, to see if $6 chicken can stand up to $60 wine. The spicy elements and fattiness of the chicken skin do a little bit to cut through the almost syrupy wine. But not enough. We might have been better off with a slightly more acidic wine here (that’s what we’d been expecting from the Venus); we’re talking wines like the Palacios “As Sortes” Godello ($32) that we love so much; or the Au Bon Climat Pinot Gris/Pinot Blanc that’s a stand-out at its price ($15).

More or less, it’s looking not so much that we picked the wrong price-point wine for our thrifty Zankou, but that we picked the wrong wine, regardless of price. And, maybe, just maybe, not the wrong wine for this food — but the wrong wine for us.

When it comes down to it, our experiment was conceptually flawed. Pairing food and wine isn’t about what the items cost. And while it’s a little bit about flavor profiles, it’s most definitely about personal taste (perhaps even more so than anything else). Our gimmick of the $6 chicken and the $60 wine was…well, ultimately just a gimmick, and one that didn’t have the results we would have liked: proof that you can pair any food with any wine regardless of cost. It was a clever-ish concept that we hoped would pan out into a clever-ish blog post. Perhaps not so much in either case!

All that said, we don’t regret for one moment opening up a fancy bottle of vino, trying something new, experimenting, and not really liking the result. That just comes with the territory of curiosity and discovery that are a couple of the best things about exploring wine. Though we love Pax, we think we’ll be sticking with their red wines for a while.

(note: after our tasting of this wine, we had Simon of Larchmont taste it; his gut reaction was that it was a white wine made by a vintner used to making red wine, and this further backs up our desire to stay with the Pax reds for the time being.)

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