Best’s Riesling 2011
Best’s Sparkling Shiraz 2009
Best’s Bin ‘0’ Shiraz 2010
De Bortoli Reserve Pinot Noir 2008
Yeringberg ‘Yeringberg’ Cabernet blend 2008
De Bortoli Noble One 2008
I am still excited by the fact that it’s still early days when matching wine with Chinese cuisine. For me, that means there’s an element of exploration when trying this in earnest. While the Star Trek analogy of going where no man has gone before is perhaps stretching the idea a little too far, it’s still early enough to contemplate combinations that might be genuinely original – such is the depth and variation of the multitude of cuisines in China.
So it was no small degree of anticipation and indeed a little trepidation that I gathered with a group of Chinese food and wine experts, several on the RVF team, to explore some possibilities with Victorian wines and some modern spins on classical Beijing cuisine at Cai Yi Xuan Restaurant at the new and rather impressive Four Seasons Hotel.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the process happened before the arrival of any food. The hotel had prepared a menu with a very strong emphasis on seafood, yet most of the wines we had arranged for the dinner were red. Without suggesting for a moment that I’m of the old school in which it’s only possible to put reds with red meat, whites with white meat and only ever with seafood, it’s important to recognise that if you’re going to match wines from grapes like shiraz and cabernet sauvignon with fish, shellfish and crustaceans – all of which is entirely possible – you do need to have thought it out pretty well in advance.
So after a little scrambling around with menu possibilities, some positive and significant changes were made, each of which made the evening a little less challenging and a whole lot more enjoyable.
On the whole, I think it’s best to take a relaxed approach with the matching of wine and food. While at the end of the day there are some imperatives that generally hold true, it’s often the things that surprise that provide the greatest pleasure. When you find an unexpected match, it brings you into the experience, which always feels more satisfying.
We began with a dish of homemade potato noodle rolled with spinach and sesame sauce, a savoury dish with a creamy, nutty texture that was paired with a deliciously balanced and marginally sweet Best’s Riesling 2011 from Great Western in the Grampians region of western Victoria. Both dish and wine offered great pleasure, but the combination just didn’t work for us. A young, lightly mineral chardonnay would better have complemented the nutty aspects and texture of the dish and would have had more in common with its savoury qualities.
Next up was a serve of braised pork rib with hawthorn (I’m taking the names straight from the set menu), which we undertook with an Australian speciality – a sparkling shiraz made with the Champagne technique. The wine was another from Best’s – its Sparkling Shiraz 2009. The dish was spicy and quite meaty, with a pronounced caramelised aspect. While the underlying (and quite gentle) tannins in the wine appeared to make the meat seem a little drier, the hawthorn was just perfect in the way it offset the bitterness of the old vine shiraz fruit, the sourness and blackness of the hawthorn creating a delightful connection with the meaty, chocolatey influences in the wine. Could anything have worked even better? A Brunello – for its juiciness and even greater emphasis on sourness and acidity.
Next came a rich, rather gluggy dish that I absolutely adored – slow cooked lotus roots filled with glutinous rice and rock sugar. Again, since we had but a single white, there was perhaps unfair pressure on the riesling, pressure that perhaps a generous, sumptuous chardonnay or an old Vouvray would not have experienced!
But the riesling came into its own a few moments later once there appeared a combination of blend clam with preserved vegetables. The creamy, fleshy nature of the clam and its spicy presentation tucked in beautifully with the riesling’s hint of sugar and was neatly wrapped up by the riesling’s racy acidity.
Next came a dish that we honestly didn’t have the partner for. Some delicious deep fried king prawn coated with wasabi, mayonnaise dressing and mango was tested and failed with the riesling and De Bortoli’s Noble One, a benchmark Australian dessert wine, but one was too sweet, the other insufficiently so. The dish – itself very rich, thick and meaty, with a pronounced spiciness and genuine ‘fishiness’ – called for a riesling of auslese sweetness or perhaps a spicy gruner veltliner with bottle-age. Never mind!
Again, facing a menu perhaps still best suited to white wine, a course of steamed tiger grouper was just too fishy and earthy to handle red wine, since the tannins went metallic every time we tried. So, with complete creative freedom, we decided than a mature Alsatian gewürztraminer would deliver the richness, texture, sweetness and acid balance that the dish demanded.
And so to a dish of steamed vegetable dumplings served with black truffle and baked whole abalone pastry with diced chicken. In the absence of an obvious partner, experimentation was required. So we tried the riesling, but its flavour didn’t quite partner that of the abalone. It lacked the length of intense, assertive fruit to counter the abalone’s wild, earthy influences. The sparkling shiraz came close, since it handled the sweetness of the pastry, the richness of flavour and the texture and depth of the dish. What we didn’t have at hand that would have made the exercise academic was an aged, leesy old Champagne with texture and savoury emphasis. Krug would have been perfect.
Next came wok-fried diced Wagyu beef prepared with garlic and scallion, a dry beef dish with a fibrous texture that suited the fruit profile and backbone of the Yeringberg ‘Yeringberg’ cabernet blend, and perhaps might have done even better with Brunello.
Thinking that its structure and spice would work tightly with a dish of pigeon baked with wild mushroom, we found that the De Bortoli Pinot Noir Reserve 2008 – from a fine Yarra vintage between two bushfire-affected seasons in this region – made the flesh of the pigeon more juicy and brought out its smokiness. It was an excellent match.
While the next course of poached vegetable sprouts with black fungus and tomato had us wishing we had a spicy, toasty and textured Condrieu of some bottle-age, we terminated with a modern spin on a traditional Beijing dessert theme – an apple sugar crust. Its toffee apple-like richness and flavour were just perfectly matched by one of Australia’s most luscious and concentrated dessert wines, De Bortoli’s Noble One from 2008.
Our evening was a mixture of perfect, if sometimes surprising matches, plus several cases in which we couldn’t marry wine with cuisine. That shouldn’t deter anyone from continuing this journey, since there’s still so much to discover. And that just has to be fun!
