Pairing Spice-Driven Cuisines With Wine

Pairing spice-driven cuisines with wine has long been a challenge but with a little imagination, it doesn’t have to be.

- Nimmi Malhotra

Spice and chilli sit at the heart of Asian food. Our rich and diverse cuisines would be incomplete without the warmth of ginger and galangal, the numbing sensation of Sichuan peppers, or the scintillating burn of bird’s eye chillies.

In Europe, food and wine made from grapes evolved simultaneously to naturally complement and balance each other. Asian cuisines, on the other hand, developed over centuries without grape wine and sought to find harmony with components of sweet, sour, salty and bitter within the meal. Balance can also come in the form of the various condiments on offer: sambal, belachan, shimi-chi togarashi flakes or a wedge of lime.

Due to the complexity of Asian cuisine, finding the right wines to pair them with rightfully pose a challenge. Should the wine complement the meat or the sauce? Should it mute the heat or not? For most, the foolproof answer is an off-dry Riesling; its residual sugar mutes the heat, high acidity refreshes the palate and low alcohol soothes the burn.

But Derek Li, group sommelier for Jia Group in Hong Kong, doesn’t believe Riesling satisfies all of his clients: “Asian people love the spiciness. They want to feel the Sichuan pepper, feel the sensation of numbness. People come to eat spicy food to feel the heat. Off-dry Riesling, with its sugar, kills the spiciness.” Before recommending wines, he makes it a point to ask diners if they want to experience the spiciness or mute it out. “It really changes the recommendation at our restaurants like Cha Cha Wan [a Thai restaurant],” he says. “Pairing wine with spicy food is a subjective choice.”