Q: How would you pair chicken rice with western wine?
A: Actually, I love Hainanese chicken rice with gruner veltliner (an indigenous Austrian top pick). It sounds crazy, but the version (of chicken rice) you have here in Singapore has a lot of garlic, and a pretty dark soya sauce, and robust flavours — and a really ripe gruner veltliner has a really sharp acidity, very linear; it’s not floral, it’s more savoury and herbal. And the finish has a white pepper kind of flavour that is able to match up and stand up to both the garlic and the ginger.
Q: And with pepper crab?
A: I think today (at the seminar) we had a very good example of moscato, which is a lightly sweet sparkling wine, and was from South Australia. But there are lots of examples from Northern Italy. I would also be equally happy with a very good Prosecco, and even a chilled rose from Provence might be a very good pairing.
Q: Pairing prawn mee, though, is a bit more challenging?
A: I find pairing wine with a soup is very hard because it’s very difficult to slush around in your mouth. So what you are really pairing the wine with are the noodles and the prawns. I find this dish fairly medium bodied, not so heavy. It is very pungent and powerful, actually. And most people add additional chilli. So it’s quite a flavourful and spicy dish. I would pair this with a robust and aromatic white from the Alsace region. Or maybe even an albarino from Spain. You don’t want a flabby, skinny, thin, light-bodied white. You want something with substance and a strong personality, with a bit of floral character, some citrus.
So the whites from Alsace are usually very strong in personality, whether it’s the gewurztraminer, the riesling, the pinot gris or the pinot blanc, because they’re pretty aromatically intense and they have good acidity.
Master Of Wine Jeannie Cho Lee on culinary marriages
Reported by Don Mendoza
No comments:
Post a Comment