Mix And Match - Wine With Spicy Food

Having wine with spicy foods? Epicure asked experienced sommeliers how they would best tackle the longstanding dilemma and their wine pairing selections.

- Nimmi Malhotra

Pairing wine with spicy, piquant dishes remains a divisive issue. The answer has never been as straight as the tenet of red meat with red wine'. Spice creates varied nuances in cuisines, so it is natural for the pairing question to lead to an equally multi-layered answer.

Asian meals, ranging from Thai, Chinese and Korean to Indian, Malay and Singaporean, are often found on communal sharing tables with a smattering of condiments to fill out the missing flavours. Lemon offers acid; sambals amp up the heat, and soy sauce adds umami. The incongruent harmony delights the palate but wreaks havoc on wines, overwhelming their flavours.

Consider the western meal, which is usually a staged affair: a coursed meal which calls for wine to fill out the palate and provide acid or sugar where needed. In Asia, we have big sharing plates, and we are going from fish and noodles back to meat. It's all upside down, says Stephanie Rigourd, partner and director of Vintage Wine Club. The European pairing basics of pairing one dish with one wine, she says, does not work in Asia.

It's easy to give up on the wine quest and resort to the effervescence of beer to calm your palate (the truth is, beer neuters the taste instead of placating the taste buds). But with a bit of effort, you can find a multitude of wines that can stand up to spice and create balance and synergy.

Rigourd says, We must adapt wine to this culture, not the other way around. Having lived in Singapore for over a decade, she has acquiesced to the Asian spice-loving palate. If you love eating spicy foods and you love that heat, then you don't need to soften down. So just bear in mind that anything you drink with such food won't taste the same.

From chilli padi to toasty gochujang, chillies excite the taste buds, and our palates are indeed programmed to enjoy them. The burning sensation is generated by capsaicin, a chemical compound found in chillies.