What Wine Goes With Butter Chicken?

An off-dry white. Riesling or Gewurztraminer first; Pinot Gris or Viognier if you want more weight in the glass.

Butter chicken is the friendliest curry to pair because it is not really a hot dish. Murgh makhani was built at Moti Mahal in post-Partition Delhi to rescue unsold tandoori chicken in a sauce of tomato, butter and cream. Which of that restaurant's founding partners actually did it has been fought over in the Delhi High Court since 2024, in a suit running past 2,700 pages. Richness, not heat, is what you are pairing against.

Five bottles, and the job each one does

Why Gewurztraminer smells like the dish

This is not something you are imagining. In 1999 Ong and Acree ran fresh lychee, canned lychee and Gewürztraminer wine through the same aroma analysis and found twelve odour-active compounds shared by all three. cis-Rose oxide was the one their work pinned the lychee note on. The grape shares its signature aroma molecule with lychee — and lychee, rose and ginger are the same register the garam masala is playing in.

The name admits as much. Gewürz is German for spice, bolted onto Traminer to mark out the intensely aromatic mutation. Traminer is usually traced to Tramin in South Tyrol, though ampelographers have been picking holes in that derivation for years. Alsace has used the longer name since about 1870 — and spells it, then as now, without the umlaut.

How to buy a bottle that is actually off-dry

"Get something off-dry" is useless advice if you cannot tell from the shelf, which is where most people give up and buy a Sauvignon Blanc.

Alsace has half-fixed this. An order of 28 May 2021 means that, from the 2021 harvest, whites carrying the plain AOC Alsace or Vin d'Alsace name must declare their sweetness — sec, demi-sec, moelleux or doux — either as the word or as a marker on a sliding scale, front label or back. Demi-sec is the band this dish wants: 4 to 12 g/l of residual sugar. Then look at what the order leaves out, because that is where the interesting bottles are. Vendanges tardives and sélection de grains nobles are written out of the text, and Alsace Grand Cru sits under its own appellation rather than this one — so the grander the Gewurztraminer, the less you should expect the label to tell you. Our wine sweetness chart puts those numbers in context, and the guide to reading a wine label covers the German terms.

Where people go wrong

The tannic red is the classic error. Cream, tomato and warm spice will make a Cabernet or a Malbec taste bitter and hot, and the alcohol amplifies whatever chilli is in the pan.

The subtler mistake is a bone-dry, high-acid white. A steely Chablis with butter chicken is not offensive, it is invisible — the cream coats your palate and the wine has nothing left to say. And if what you are eating is a vindaloo or a jalfrezi rather than a makhani, push the sweetness further and the alcohol lower; what works here will not be enough there.