Which wine with Chinese cuisine?

The goal of the International Congress of Chinese Cuisine & Wine is to explore and discover the best possible wine and Chinese food pairings for the benefit of the consumer as well as F&B professionals and restaurateurs.

For this purpose a panel of international experts came together to taste different Chinese dishes and pair them with a selection of fine red and white wine from Europe and the New World. Keeping all tastes in mind, the selection of wines was rounded off with a single malt from Scotland. The idea was that the panel would pair, experiment and discuss which wines in their view best matched different Chinese dishes. To this end the panellists sampled several representative dishes from Teochew, Sichuan and Cantonese cuisines at three well known specialist restaurants in Singapore, exploring what characteristics of the wines worked best with the dishes and gave their reasons.

In discovering the ideal wines, participants also found out which wines they thought were unsuitable with these dishes. While Individual tastes varied, they arrived at the happy conclusion that there were enough different types and styles of wines to engage and marry the great cuisines of China and enhance the experience of both.

I was privileged to have been invited as a "panelist" to this Congress. The other panelists included Andrew Caillard (MW), Jeannie Cho Lee (MW), Fuchsia Dunlop, Li De Mei and Guy Woodward. Here in India, in practically every issue of Sommelier India we discuss how Indian food should be paired with wine especially through the Sommelier India Tasting Panel. And with the Sommelier India Wine Competition, we will be going one step further. Still, over the next year, we will be exploring more deeply which Indian cuisines pair well with which wines and in that the ICCCW serves as an excellent model to follow.

The findings and recommendations of the panel will be published by SI Online, so watch this space.