What wine to drink with olio spaghetti with garlic and prawns

One of my wife's famous dishes is her olio spaghetti with garlic and prawns.  The dish is relatively easy to make, and outstanding as a starter or main.  Tonight we are having her Garlic Prawns with Spaghetti as a main with a side salad.

On its own, we would have considered drinking a Riesling, but felt a better match with the food was a 2010 Pierro  LTC.  For those of you who do not know of Pierro, it is a great winery in Margaret River.  They make a wonderful Chardonnay and a wonderful Sauvignon Blanc among other great wines.

The Pierro LTC (which interestingly enough stands for 'Little Touch of Chardonnay') is a 75% Sauvignon Blanc and 25% Semillon blend.  The Semillon adds some structure and lasting power to the Sauvignon Blanc, but this is still a wine you want to drink while it is fresh and not more than a couple of years old.  It is a good wine to go with all sorts of fish and seafood.  We will only drink half the bottle tonight and I will use the rest to go with the entree for lunch I plan to have this Thursday at Fish on the Rocks before getting into the 2009 Bouchard Pere & Fils Puligny Montrachet to go with either lobster or the Moreton Bay Bugs.

The real question of what wine goes best with this dish depends on how much garlic you put into it.  With less garlic (and the prawn being more prominent), the Peirro LTC is a great match.  However, tonight we put a lot of garlic into the dish - about 10 gloves for two servings!  We love our garlic, and loved the food tonight, but it ended up being a little over-powering for the wine.  Next time we put this much garlic into it, we will use a Riesling instead as it 'compares to' or balances the wine with the food better.

With less garlic, the Pierro LTC matches the dish best, but with more garlic, you need a more powerful wine and I think a Riesling would be a better choice.