“This is an interesting wine,” said the wine steward as he poured the bruised-looking white into our glasses. “I think you’ll find it….meaty,” he said, a wobbly sales pitch at best.

Everyone at the table looked at each other with sly, faintly amused alarm. That word: interesting. When someone describes a book, a movie, a lecture as merely interesting, it usually indicates a colorless, banal experience. With wine or food, though, the word can signal something ghastly or wonderful or both; a love it or hate it experience; a discovery at least.

I was about to have it all.

We were at the James Beard House in New York to enjoy the food of the Knightsbridge Group, Ashok Bajaj’s six restaurants in Washington D.C. The six chefs and their assistants (left)  managed to produce some small miracles in the Beard House’s microscopic kitchen: hors d’oeuvres included Just-Made Mozzarella with Mango and Black Olives, Crispy Crab with Red Pepper Relish and Scrambled Duck Eggs on Toast with Salt-Cured Foie Gras—whipped foie gras. Sublime.

Main courses included (below, from The Bombay Club) a Crispy Arugula-Spinach Chaat with Date-Tamarind Chutney – the leaves are flash fried and the flavors vivid, making it a sybarite’s salad if ever there was one. Most of my tablemates raved about the Kazu-Marinated Buddhist Duck with Potato Confit, Farro and Honey Quince (from The Oval Room), which was paired with Patricia Green Cellars 2009 Pinot Noir, from Oregon. And it was exquisite.

But the “interesting” wine and the dish it was paired with generated the most memorable moment of the evening. The wine was from southeast Sicily: Cos 2009 Rami, which is a blend of Insolia and Grecanico, aged nine months in stainless steel. By itself, it was meaty, gamy, with disjointed honey and apricot notes. It was chunky, sort of metallic in the mouth—its characteristic minerality gone awry, perhaps. Everyone at the table made childish ick faces at their wineglasses. But then came Black Spaghetti with Catalina Island Sea Urchins, Garlic, Oil and Pepperoncino, and when enjoyed with the dish, the wine’s clangy flavors suddenly meshed; its meatiness, when paired with the earthy black spaghetti, was exquisite.

And how to describe black spaghetti? The flavor of squid ink has been described as iodine-y, which is no help, at least to me. I found it briney but also earthy. I understand that it can maximize the other flavors in a dish in which it’s featured. I only know that I was in rapture: gooey sea urchins, garlic and pepperoncino flavors supported by assertive, dark flavor of the deep sea, cooled by a honey-kissed, earthy white wine. What began as merely interesting became indescribable and divine.

I’ll avoid any movie that is described as merely interesting, but I look forward with pleasure to my next interesting wine. I only pray there’s food nearby, or a spit bucket.

Photos by Anna Mowry

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