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Why the Chinese prefer to drink red wine with food
To most westerners the idea of drinking young red Bordeaux with Chinese food seems bizarre. Especially with delicate Cantonese dishes, the most widely available of the Chinese cuisines in the west . Clearly though the Chinese who are paying stratospheric prices for first and second growths - and presumably drinking them - think differently. They don’t turn to riesling and other aromatic and off-dry whites for a reason.
The most common explanation is that it’s not a question of taste but of face. Bordeaux labels impress according to wine writer and MW Jeannie Cho Lee of Asian Palate but it’s not only about the status of the host. “Ordering an easily recognised wine label shows an acknowledgement of the importance of the relationship with the guest, sending a clear message to the recipient that says, ‘This is how important you are to me’. This is not limited to wine but has always existed in our food culture - high grade abalone can cost over US$200 for a single small serving.”
But why Bordeaux, rather than the more food-friendly burgundy? “Because the Chinese have a strong love of prestigious luxury brands and Bordeaux is the most prestigious accessible wine brand” says Doug Rumsam, managing director of Bordeaux Index in Hong Kong. “Burgundy is much more difficult to get your head around. It’s much less about food and wine matching than the best they can offer of each.”
“There’s also an element of masculinity involved in business transactions. It used to centre around hard liquor. Bordeaux would be seen as a more masculine drink.”
Such an attitude is of course is not restricted to the Chinese. “We have a lot of Bordeaux on our list because of the area we’re in” says Michael Peng of Hunan in Belgravia, one of London’s longest established upmarket Chinese restaurants. “People who love Bordeaux want to drink it with everything. We have a lot of 2nd and 3rd growths at prices that appeal to bargain-hunters.”
The colour red also has a much greater resonance in Chinese culture than it does in the west. “The red for luck thing is certainly true” says cookery writer Fuchsia Dunlop who acts as consultant to the Sichuanese restaurant Bar Shu. “Red is the colour of celebrations such as weddings and New Year's festivities. At a festive dinner table you would try to have red-coloured foods such as lobster and red grouper. So red wine would fit in with that. By contrast white is the colour of funerals in China - traditionally, mourners wear white, while brides wear red.”
Red wine also has a positive association with health, points out Jeannie Cho Lee, which would increase its prestige. “One of the key factors that popularised wine in the mid-1990s was the connection between red wine and health. If one looks at expensive, highly sought after Chinese ingredients such as bird’s nest, shark’s fin and sea cucumber the most common factor is their purported health-enhancing properties.”
There’s also the issue of language, according to Hong Kong journalist and MW Debra Meiburg. “One problem for a white wine producing region such as Alsace, is that the classic Chinese character depicting wine is a catch-all character for any alcoholic beverage. Thus when one mentions ‘white wine’ it is easily confused with domestic white spirits. Chinese newcomers to white wine find them tart and insipid compared to Chinese distilled, high alcohol ‘white-lightening’ beverages.”
White wines are also less appealing than reds because of their serving temperature. “With hot tea the traditional drink of choice for Chinese diners, migrating to a super cold white seems a much bigger step than switching to a room temperature red.” says Meiburg.
Even the tannins of young Bordeaux don’t seem as offputting as one might assume. Again the Chinese are used to tannin from drinking tea and, in some cases, stronger liquor like whisky and cognac. Michael Peng from Hunan also points out that there are dishes that positively benefit from a tannic wine. “Ingredients like jelly fish, sea cucumber and abalone tend to be quite glutinous, chewy and even slithery. When you drink a wine with tannin it cuts right through. Chinese people like those textures.”
And far from turning to an off-dry white to deal with hotter dishes the Chinese enjoy the cumulative build up of tannin and spice on the palate according to Cho Lee. “For those who are not used to the heat of Sichuan pepper for example, the tannins in red Bordeaux can exaggerated the burn. However, this is precisely what spice-lovers enjoy — prolonging the heat and spiciness of chillies, not neutralising the flavours with a jarring sweet wine."
“I’m always cautious about promoting sweet wine with spicy food” agrees Meiburg. “Sweetness has the effect of mellowing spice. For the regions that love spiciness, such as Hunan or Sichuan, diners want their spices cranked up, not toned down.”
There is a generational factor at work however. The questions of ‘face’ and preference for tannic reds is more marked among older more conservative Chinese consumers than among their younger, more widely travelled counterparts who may have been educated in the west. Bryant Mao assistant head sommelier at Chez Bruce is a Taiwanese-Canadian who finds many of the ingredients in Chinese cooking unsympathetic to red Bordeaux. “If I think of my mum’s cooking it uses a lot of sauces and condiments like vinegar and oyster sauce that clash with red wine. And white’s certainly better than red with seafood. If I’m going to drink red I tend to go for pinot noir or Italian reds or Bordeaux with a higher proportion of merlot. White bordeaux can often work better than red.”
“It does depend which region you’re in” admits Charles Sichel of Chateau Palmer. “While I would say that consumption is still 90% red the feeling we get is that white wines are becoming a little more fashionable on the east coast below Shanghai and further south where there’s a lot of fish and shellfish.”
No-one’s putting their money on whites though, least of all China’s homegrown wine producers. “At the moment, all signs seem to indicate that the Chinese are perfectly happy with red Bordeaux and full bodied Cabernet blends with their meals, regardless of how outsiders perceive their preferences” says Cho Lee. “The enormous amount of new vineyard land being planted with Cabernet Sauvignon is a clear indication that even the giant domestic wineries are continuing to bet on full bodied reds.”
This article was first published in the June 2011 issue of Decanter.
Photograph © michaeljung - Fotolia.com
Pairing rosé champagne and dim sum
Is rosé champagne a good match with dim sum? Our roving correspondent Lucy Bridgers retains admirable control of her critical faculties while being plied with successive vintages of Bollinger's Grande Année . . .
Lucy writes: The idea of pairing rosé Champagne and dim sum sounds encouraging. Dim sum usually involves a range of textures and flavours – some very powerful, such as garlic and chilli. As a table wine (ie without any sparkle), dry rosé can be a versatile choice (think how adaptable it is with tapas) and as a sparkling rosé and Champagne in particular, the effervescence has a refreshing and uplifting effect on the palate and it offers a great sense of occasion.
Recently I had the chance to explore this combination at a lunch organised by Bollinger at Yauatcha restaurant in London’s Soho. We were served a selection of vintage rosés. All delicious on their own, but some more successful with the food than others.
We started with La Grande Année Rosé 1995 (magnum) with Chinese chive and prawn dumpling, crystal dumpling wrap, and scallop shui mai. The 1995 had a brick tinged salmon colour and complex aromas of wild strawberries, honey and cream, finishing with an appetising sweet-sour tang – still surprisingly fresh and youthful, despite its maturity. However, with the food, the complexity was masked. The chive and prawn dumpling worked best, as long as you went easy on the chilli dip.
The second wine was La Grande Année Rosé 2002 – fresh, mineral and more tightly structured than the 1995. This was served with soft shell crab, venison puff, and lobster dumpling. It struggled with the strong flavours, getting a bit lost, although it was a fresh and elegant partner to the lobster dumpling. The more concentrated 1995 was a better match for the sweet meat in the venison puff and the soft shell crab which had a lot of chilli heat.
In contrast, La Grande Année Rosé 2004 had more vibrant youthful fruit that worked better with the food. Like the 1995, it had a tasty tangy quality nicely suited to dim sum, especially the dishes with bigger flavours. The menu continued with steamed wild prawn, Szechuan wonton, baked chicken with aubergine, and egg fried rice with long bean. Steering it away from the spicy sauces, the 2004 was particularly good with the prawn, revealing how well it would go with unadorned crustacea. Lobster would be a deliciously luxurious choice for this wine.
As a curiosity, they also served the 2004 and 2009 vintages of their Pinot-based red, Côte aux Enfants. At Bollinger, about 5 percent of this well-coloured, silky wine is used to create the rosé (theirs is a blended rosé, rather than made using the saignée method). The 2004 was good with the meatier dishes such as baked chicken with aubergine (which had a rich, sticky glaze) and Mongolian style venison, one of the final dishes served. (The 2009 is being released later this year and the 2004 came from their library of back vintages). They were interesting to taste, although for the price, smart red burgundy would be a more tempting candidate.
We finished lunch with strawberry yuzu and Bollinger Rosé (non-vintage). This non-vintage rosé had pretty strawberry and raspberry fruit, but was far too dry for the dessert.
Considering the meal as a whole, as long as you tread carefully with the chilli and garlic, rosé Champagne is an indulgent and versatile choice for dim sum.
Lucy Bridgers attended the lunch as a guest of Bollinger.
Matching sweet wine and Sichuanese food
Can Tokaji – the great dessert wine of Hungary, and one of the sweetest wines in the world – go with Chinese food, asks Margaret Rand? And if it can, would you want it to?
Christian Seely’s answer to both these questions is ‘yes’. He runs the wine division of AXA Millsimes, which owns such properties as Château Suduiraut in Sauternes and Disznk in Tokaj, and one of his big interests is pairing these wines with Asian cuisines.
He’s been hosting occasional dinners of this sort for several years – in London he’s done Suduiraut with Chinese food and Disznk with Indian – and the latest occasion was in Tokaj, where a brace of Chinese chefs, flown out for the occasion, cooked Sichuan dishes to match Disznoko of various vintages and levels of sweetness.
The chefs were Tommy and Andy Shan of Au Bonheur du Palais in Bordeaux. To Seely’s mind this is the best restaurant in Bordeaux and as good as any Chinese restaurant in the world – quite a recommendation. Andy Shan does the cooking; Tommy is front-of-house: gregarious, multilingual and the leader in the pair’s intensive researches into food and wine matching.
He describes their food as Sichuan, with some Cantonese influences. But it’s the strong flavours of Sichuan cooking that make it a possible match for Tokaji. Ask him which other wines he might serve in the restaurant (by the glass, to go with particular dishes rather than all the way through the meal) and he mentions Château de Beaucastel white from the Rhone; white Bandol from Provence; Banyuls; Pouilly-Fumé, especially from the late Didier Dageneau; Loire Chenin Blanc; dry and sweet Alsace from such names as Domaine Weinbach, Ostertag, Marcel Deiss and Hugel; and from outside France, Inniskillen Icewine.
Not all these wines are sweet, but some are very sweet indeed. The sugar is the attraction: it neutralizes the chilli in the food, and he plays with the balance of the two until he reaches a point of harmony.
This is anathema to the old British idea of choosing a wine to cut through the richness of a dish. Why, asks Tommy rhetorically, would you want to do that? What you want is complementarity, he says: it’s a response to the global experience of flavours. Red Bordeaux, he reckons, can be good with Cantonese cooking, with its low levels of spice and simple ingredients, but Sichuan flavours are complex and spicy and need something more challenging.
The dishes for this dinner are all classic ones. The Shans have adjusted the levels of chilli, but that’s all; otherwise the recipes are unchanged. And drinking Tokaji with them does at first seem rather odd.
There are two appetizers, beef straw potatoes with sesame seeds, and shrimps with ‘daily’ Jia-chang flavours. Neither seems particularly successful with the Late Harvest 2007, which seems to swamp them with its sweetness; and for the first course we move on to Asz 4 puttonyos 2004; a light year, but one, paradoxically, with a lot of botrytis: the wine is relatively light, with truffley, creamy notes and good acidity.
For us, drinking this Tokaji with beef tongue, and with Pang-Pang chicken with sesame creamed sauce, the sweetness is the dominant factor. For the Shans the sweetness is only part of the picture. Texture is just as vital, and the finely-sliced tongue has a silky firmness that chimes with the wine.
Yes, the sweetness stands out, but it sort of works, in an unexpected way. The chicken is delicate, though, and while the earthy note of the sesame is interesting with the wine the flavours don’t quite meet. The chilli needs to build up in the mouth a bit more; as it does, the wine begins to make more sense.Two sweeter wines follow: 5 puttonyos 2000 and 2001. With these are paired crispy, spicy sweet-and-sour Yuxiang chicken; King prawns fried in the ‘Halook’ wok; and leg of pork braised Dong-Po style (caramelized version). The two wines are totally different, the 2000 full of apricot and pineapple flavours, fresh, clean and focused, the 2001 leaner, smokier and more pungent. One might have backed the 2001 to match the food better, but in fact it’s the 2000 that is superb with the pork.
Texturally the slow-cooked pork is soft and richly fatty; the flavours are complex, with star anise to the fore. It’s a hit. The chicken is also pretty good with the 2000; perhaps it’s the higher acidity of the 2001 that gets in the way? But the dense flavour of the prawns works better with the 2001.
Then even sweeter wines, the 2000 and 1999 6 puttonyos. These are to go with veal with Chinese anise and tangerine peel, and Tsasui caramelized roast pork. The 2000 is pungent, creamy and approachable, the 1999 more linear, with higher acidity; and the veal is dark and caramelized, with a note of star anise. Neither is perfect, but the complexity of the 1999 is quite successful both with the veal and with the hot, pungent pork, and a faint tingle on the tongue from Sichuan pepper helps them to come together.
And finally, the biggest surprise of all: 1993 6 puttonyos with what is described as smoked salmon in red pepper oil. Well, it’s not smoked salmon in the Scottish sense; it is a cube of salmon that has been smoked and caramelised on one side. The texture is soft and melting; and the match is sensationally good. It’s the star of the evening: adventurous, imaginative and spot-on.
All of which raises the question: how do the Shans arrive at these matches? The answer is, via the 23 families into which they divide spices. They taste a wine, and they’re able, pretty easily now, to pinpoint the particular family of spices with which it will go. After that it’s a question of texture and heat.
And it works. I wouldn’t want to drink Tokaji all through a Chinese meal, even one as good as this; but that is not the intention of the Shans, or of Christian Seely. It’s a glass with a particular course that is the idea.
It might be a bit of a problem then switching to something drier – or even something red – for the course that follows, but it would certainly keep one on one’s toes. And it makes Chinese food freshly exotic, so that one can discover it anew – which is rather fun.
Image credit: Leacky Chen from Pixabay
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