In Tanzania, South African Pinotage makes a new friend

Many African cuisines do not have a formalised tradition of food and wine pairing. Most sommelier training programmes offer little exposure to the continent’s extraordinary culinary range. Even wine experts, who know the flavours from home-cooked, lived experience, have often been taught their trade within Eurocentric pairing paradigms that inadvertently inhibit their approach to African ingredients and recipes.

Too often, when asked to match a dish of African origin with a beverage, the wine fundis default to beer – which is, at best, an unimaginative cop-out. We all love a hop-led refresher, but if wine can be paired well with sushi, a cuisine once considered equally far removed from the European canon, then there is no reason to exclude African food genres.

In October I was working on an epicurean assignment in Tanzania. In the course of my travels I met Stephano Kimeni, the wonderful wine steward at Singita Serengeti. One evening I ordered a beautiful bowl of mtori green banana soup and asked Kimeni for a wine recommendation. There was an initial offer of beer but I insisted that I wanted wine, so he proposed Lyngrove Platinum Pinotage 2016. Seldom have I had such a surprising yet perfect pairing.

Mtori is a signature dish of the Chagga people from the Kilimanjaro region of northern Tanzania. The green bananas (ndizi za kupika in Swahili) that form the base of the recipe have a mild, gently sweet, slightly vegetal taste and a delicate herbal aroma. In this silken soup, they meld and mellow with siagi ya moshi (calabash-shaken, smoked butter) onions, garlic, ginger and beef stock. The resulting viscosity is thick enough to coat a spoon yet light enough to glide over the palate. My bowl was also adorned with slivers of crisp butter-fried beef, an elegant swirl of dried banana, toasted sesame seeds and a small squeeze of lime.

Traditionally, mtori soup was served as comfort and convalescence cuisine, often offered to post-partum women to restore strength. But there is no law that says you must just have had a baby to enjoy a bowl of green banana bliss. In fact, if the plan is to savour the soup with wine it is advisable to be unencumbered by an infant. Since my baby is almost 18 years old, I felt no compunction about agreeing to Kimeni’s suggested pairing of mtori and Lyngrove Platinum Pinotage 2016.

Alchemy ensued. In general, I am not a great fan of wine waffle, but this combination deserves delineation. The meaty stock found savoury resonance with dark fruit flavours in the wine. Herbal notes in the green bananas appreciated cross-continental faint fynbos flavours. Classic Tanzanian tastes of coconut milk, cinnamon and ginger in the soup embraced equivalent elements in the wine. A whisper of the embers that infused the calabash during the traditional butter-making process amplified the wine’s smoky sweet oak, elegant yet earthy essence.

Structurally, velvety tannins (well integrated by age) and poised acidity in the Pinotage simultaneously connected with the rich soup and offered a crisp counterpoint between spoons. The full-rounded palate with vanilla-kissed loveliness held the soup’s ginger glow, uniting the contents of bowl and glass in an elegant aromatic embrace.

The Lyngrove website suggests pairing their wine with “slow-roasted venison shanks and caramelised figs”. I haven’t experienced this specific combination, but I can well imagine the wonderful ways in which the wine would lean into that classic Cape, subtly spiced, sweet in the savoury rich, gamey depth. I can imagine it because, over the years, I have had multiple delightful variations on the theme.

It is the sort of suggestion that has accompanied Pinotage since its inception. It is fabulous and familiar but rooted in assumptions about Pinotage’s limited wine pairing potential that are no longer accurate. South Africa’s homegrown cultivar has a history of high alcohol and overextraction, but it is no longer that problem child of yesteryear. Modern Pinotage (such as those produced by Lyngrove) are far more versatile and deserve a chance to spread their wings and fly beyond the same old, same old.

Tanzania’s mtori provides a compelling, if unexpected, alternative. Gentle, soothing carb-laden aromatic, slow-building, umami savouriness shines, allowing the wine to express itself in another register. Three cheers for the venison stew version on a cold winter night, but I am also excited about broadening the perception of places to enjoy Pinotage.

It is almost impossible to imagine two more different pairing suggestions, but both bring deliciousness to the table. There can never be too many types of delicious. Thanks to Kimeni’s superb suggestion, ingredients, recipes and methods that were superficially worlds apart aligned and harmonised with an exquisite effortless, transcendent clarity. This made me very happy. DM