Matching Wines with the Hot-Sour-Salty-Sweet Foods of Asia (1/4)

The U.S. has gone far beyond the point where Asian influenced food is found only in ethnic restaurants. It’s in our homes, our supermarkets, bookstores and televisions; and American culinary schools are now turning out legions of chefs who apply the concepts of Asian cooking everywhere they go. And I mean everywhere: it’s no longer surprising to find Chinese style spring rolls in “regional” American restaurants, Thai style curries in “French” restaurants, and Japanese style marinades or even sushi in steakhouses and seafood eateries. Wine, of course, is a product indigenous to European culture and gastronomy. Since wine is not natural or traditional in Asian settings, the combination may be problematic. But it is not an impossible one. What it takes is a little more imagination. It also takes a special effort to understand the problematics because nothing in the world will discourage everyday consumers from wanting to enjoy wine with Asian foods, natural or not. While Asian food is not a classic wine match, Asian style cooking is classic and traditional in its right, and in different ways from European cuisines. There are differences in ingredients, of course, but also differences in the sense of balance and harmony in the cooking style. Whereas, say, classic Italian cooking relies on a certain purity and freshness of ingredients, and French cooking on depth of flavor in sauces and natural stocks, in Asia the emphasis is on the balancing and contrasting of tastes and textures. A perfect introduction to this approach can be found in Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid’s excellent (and beautifully photographed) book called Hot Sour Salty Sweet, a “Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia.” According to Alford and Duguid, “The basic (Southeast Asian) palate is hot, sour, salty, sweet, and sometimes bitter. If you order a green papaya salad from a street vendor in Thailand, the last thing the vendor will do before serving the salad is to give you a small spoonful of the salad, asking for your opinion. If you'd like it hotter, more chiles will be added; if you want it saltier, more fish sauce; more sour, lime juice will be added; sweeter, more palm sugar... And while this balancing act takes place in an individual dish like a green papaya salad, it also shapes a meal, determining what dishes should be served alongside others…” Not that this emphasis on contrast, balance, and varying textures is exclusive to Southeast Asian or Chinese cooking. In Germany, for instance, there is a lot of balancing of sweet, sour, salty, and fatty/meaty textures (sauerkraut, wurst, sauerbrauten, etc.); which is why the Germans are more apt to drink off-dry to medium sweet Rieslings (if not beer) with their foods, as opposed to the bone dry styles of wines predominant in France, Italy and Spain. Not surprisingly, many of today's food and wine consultants strongly recommend German Rieslings or beer with Southeast Asian and Chinese foods. The natural sugar/acid balance of Rieslings is quite compatible with the hot, sour, salty, sweet elements of Asian foods; and beer provides fluid qualities with mildly bitter undertones that add further to the equation. It's a question of harmony and balance. If it works for German foods, it certainly works in Asian food settings. The trick to matching wine with Asian style cooking is to start with the premise that we need wines that emphasize a balance, as opposed to sheer power, of taste sensations. This is why the classic "power" wines of the world -- made from grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay -- are not easily matched with Asian foods. Although there is nothing wrong with intensity, the difficulty with these types of wines is that they tend to be high in alcohol, low in acid, and (in the case of Cabernet) excessively hard and palate drying in tannin.