These wines go well with Asian food
When you think of Asian dishes, you might think of an ice-cold beer rather than a beautiful glass of wine. It’s also tricky to choose a wine to pair with all those pronounced flavors, but these tips will get you a long way.
Lumping all Asian food together is of course the same as lumping all European food together: idiotic. Still, with almost all Asian cuisines, it’s much more difficult to choose a wine than with Western dishes. Many dishes are very pronounced in their use of spices, intensely sour or extremely spicy. That calls for very specific wines.
Great Wall wine
Don’t forget that hardly any wine is made in Asia. I’ve drunk ‘Great Wall wine’ in China and visited a vineyard in Myanmar, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone follow in my footsteps. Yuck. Still, a good pairing is far from impossible.
In any case, leave the heavy wines alone. The flavor of oaky chardonnay disappears completely with most dishes, except for light Asian dishes, where it overwhelms everything. The same goes for red wines with lots of tannins, such as cabernet sauvignon or merlot. If you like those, just drink them after the meal.
High in acidity
No, you need wines that are high in acidity and provide a pleasantly refreshing counterpoint to spicy food. Sauvignon blanc and pinot gris are good examples. With highly aromatic dishes such as Indian food, a fruity riesling is a good match. Is your food very spicy? A wine with just a little residual sugar goes very well with it—also a riesling, for example. Or a pinot blanc. And don’t immediately think of sweet white wine with an ice cube; a good off-dry wine is genuinely delicious, especially with spicy food.
Light red
Prefer red wine? Then choose lighter varieties such as the gamay grape, which is widely found in Beaujolais. Or go for pinot noir or a German spätburgunder. Still want something a little fuller-bodied? Choose a Spanish garnacha (grenache), which has more body but still pairs well with Asian food.
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