Wine with Asian foods??

[TheEngineer]

Hey IgG, thanks for the crosspost. It is a topic that I work on err...all the time [img]http://wines.com/ubb/smile.gif[/img]

(posted on another board)
I think that too many people simplify the matching of Chinese food with wine and as such, we always hear of the riesling working well with spicy Chinese food. So stepping back,

We need to define the term Chinese food. Most of the (#!#@!$) stuff that is served as Chinese food really is not. Ask a chinese person in China what Egg foo young, General Tzu, and fortune cookies are and they are liable to look right through you. So if we are talking about regional chinese cooking, the foods can range from extremely delicate to extreme spicy.

Selection of wines for each dish is rather the same exercise that you go through for a Western meal. We ask ourselves the same questions

(1) who is ordering what? How many times do we go out for dinner with say 8 people and we have 2 steaks, 1 fish, 2 ducks, 1 lamb, 1 pasta and one salad? Put all that in the middle of the table and it looks like a Chinese meal.

(2) Look at how the dish is constructed. Is the dish hearty, is there much charring, what cuts of meat are being used, what is the sauce from. Much like a western dish, this should drive what wine is selected. If multiple dishes, do we not try multiple wines anyways with a large group of dinners.

(3) While chinese dinners can be communal in nature, the formal dinners are by sequence, one dish at at time, much like a tasting menu. The problem is that in a tasting menu, you also start with light to heavy foods whereas in a formal chinese menu, the first two appetizer courses are often meat and then seafood, followed by a soup, then back to meats before moving onto the seafood again and then the psot meal items. This makes it difficult to start with light whites and end with heavy reds. Two choices here. As noted in the article, have all the wines ready to go ant match by dish or have the super flexible whites, light reds and sparkling wines that can move through the entire meal.

(4) communal dinners can also be requested to come out in sequence and by dish so that you can move from light white to heavy reds if desired and the dishes would match that sequence. This is done very often in Hong Kong.

I think as the understanding of Chinese cuisine improves in the West and as Wine knowledge improves in the East, there will be a better acceptance of the non-normal practises and a coming together these to form the new dining / wine equiette.