Rules To Follow When Matching Wine With Southeast Asian Food

There are several golden rules to follow when matching wine with Southeast Asian food.

- Richard

Matching wine and food is like trying to solve the meaning of life, or determining which hawker makes Singapore’s best chicken rice: it’s an endless argument with no correct answer, but that doesn’t stop us from trying.

Restricting the food to Southeast Asian cuisine hardly helps limit the options, such is the multiplicity of styles, ingredients and flavours on offer here, from popiah to laksa, mee goreng to chicken rice.

Furthermore, many different dishes are often served simultaneously, and there’s no way to find a single wine that will match everything on the table. Believe me, I’ve tried. However, there are a few golden rules that can help guide us towards an optimal experience.

PARTNERS IN WINE

For the first rule, we need to define what an ideal wine and food match actually means. Simply put, it is finding the most complementary partnership of flavour – which therefore makes it a subjective and personal opinion. One person’s harmony can be another person’s misery, so the first rule is that we should be confident with our own preferences.

Even so, other rules offer guidance that should be universal. One of the most pertinent for Southeast Asian cuisine relates to spiciness. Supercharged chillies are a knockout blow for most wines, especially traditional European reds. Not only does the heat of the dish overcome any nuance of wine flavour, but it can exacerbate tannins, leaving your palate feeling astringent and unrefreshed.