PAIRING WINE & ASIAN FOOD

Most of us take for granted that beer, not wine, is the proper partner for Asian cooking. It just seems right—a cool cold one at hand, light, sparkling, slightly bitter, a ready match for those hot, sour, salty-sweet flavors abounding in Asian foods.

For that rare time when someone insists on wine with Asian fare, the standard suggestion is Gewurztraminer, “because the spicy flavors in the wine go well with the spicy flavors of the food.” It’s a pat answer for a complex cuisine—and the marriage doesn’t often take. (The problem is Gewurztraminer’s often high alcohol.)

(As a matter of course, Asian cooks serve neither beer nor wine with their cooking. They’d more likely drink water, fruit juice or broth-based soup.)

But certain sorts of wine are terrific with Asian cooking. The same principles that work for other, non-Asian food and wine pairings also come to play when matching Asian cuisine with wine.

All wine and food pairings work (or don’t) because elements in the food or wine—such as acidity, sugar, fat, alcohol, salt and tannin—pair well together or do not.

Photo by Lee Myungseong on unsplash.com

Wines that work
For starters, the easiest wine match for Asian cooking is the wine that mimics beer itself—cold, light, sparkling demi-sec or brut Champagne or sparkling wine. (Also, sake mimes beers as a drink that is slightly yeasty and has a sweet edge.)

Why is sparkling wine (or, for that matter, beer) a good partner for the complexity of Asian cooking? Because wines—especially white wines—that are moderately alcoholic, with good acidity, made from cool climate fruit, and that sport a whisper of sweetness have proven to be the best matches for almost any cuisine at all.

The bubbles are just toppers.
Looked at another way, high alcohol wines both make salty foods taste saltier and overwhelm subtle flavors in food—a one-two punch against Asian cooking. Wines low in acidity (say, many an Australian or American Chardonnay) don’t do well with foods with marked saltiness (many an Asian dish).

Sweetness in food requires the same level of sweetness in wine (think apple tart with semi-sweet Muscat). Because a lot of Asian cooking contains a good dose of sugar—out-and-out refined sugar, for example, or sweet marinades, oyster sauce, mirin (sweet Japanese rice wine), palm sugar, fruits or coconut milk—it pairs best with a wine with a bit of residual sugar. Totally dry wines, white or red, taste quite harsh in the presence of sweetness in food.

Red wines are even more problematic for Asian food than whites. If red, the best wine partner is moderate in alcohol, soft of tannin, and high in fruit.

Wines such as Gamay, Grenache, Dolcetto, some Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, some styles of moderately tannic Sangiovese and Syrah—and almost any soft, fairly dry pink wine—make good marriages with Asian cooking.

Why? Because meats cooked in the Asian way are often marinated in sweet things; sauces are frequently combinations of salt, sweet, pepper and vinegar; and meats are generally lean, not fatty.

Red wines such as Cabernet Sauvignon or some versions of Shiraz/Syrah that are high in alcohol and with gripping tannins are ruinous with salty or vinegar-y foods. And because Asian meats are generally low in fat, they require wines with only a little tannin, not a lot, to help cut through their paucity of fat.

Finally, buckets of fruit flavors are good matches for cooking that is spicy, salty, slightly sweet, and even bitter.

It helps to note that many of the world’s other foods are just as multi-layered as those from Asia. Much German or Alsatian cooking, for example, is every bit as sweet, salty and fatty as any duck in Hoisin sauce. Italian radicchio agrodolce; collard greens with pork belly, brown sugar and vinegar; or a sweet-sour stir-fry of gai lan (Chinese broccoli)—all three are bitter, sweet and sour.

The kinds of wines that taste best with these kinds of food preparations—white wines with low alcohol, high acidity and that are off-dry; and red wines of like manner and that are both low in tannin and high in fruit—also work best with Asian fare.

For some examples, search out German Rieslings, Spanish Albariños, many sparkling wines, Sauvignon Blancs (of a certain style), Chenin Blanc, many Alsatian wines, Beaujolais, young Pinot Noirs, Chinon and Bourgueil from the Loire—and those delicious, fruity, fairly dry pink wines made the world over.

Well, except in Asia.

A note on “fusion” cooking
Taken historically, no cuisine of the world is completely indigenous. The Italians, for example, borrowed from Asia, Africa and the Middle East; the French, from the Italians; the Vietnamese from the French; and the Americans, from anybody.

Consider Southern American cooking, a stew of Scots, Irish, Acadian, African, Creole and Yankee foodstuffs. Contemporary Australian and new British cuisines take in influences from myriad sources.

Likewise, what’s called “fusion” cooking can be thought of as merely a mix of one or several Asian elements—curry, wasabi, soy, miso, ginger, papaya, coconut, fish sauce, tamarind—with a cuisine that is itself already a fusion of others.

The key to wine matches is still the same: those elements such as sweet, salt, alcohol or acid in either the wine or the food.