What wine would do justice to the explosive taste of fried chilli prawns? How about beef satay, or chicken in a spicy coconut sauce? Now imagine you are in Singapore or Malaysia and that all three dishes, plus half a dozen more besides, are set before you. How could you possibly match wine to such a panoply of competing and powerful flavours?
Korean-born Jeannie Cho Lee, the only Asian among the world's 279 Masters of Wine, spent two years trying to puzzle out precisely that. She travelled to 10 Asian food cities – Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Tokyo, Seoul, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Mumbai – sampling dishes and figuring out which wines, if any, would make a worthy addition to an already sumptuous table. The resulting book, Asian Palate, published in November, is an attempt to understand food in its own context and to suggest appropriate wine without imposing alien tastes on some of the world's complex cuisines.
“I wanted to see how wine fits in to our Asian food culture,” she says when I meet her in a private dining room in the China Club, a Hong Kong club that eschews the stuffiness of more traditional establishments. “I think food is place-driven,” she says, drawing a parallel with what wine experts refer to as the terroir to denote the characteristics that a grape draws from its geography. “It is the entire environment from which that particular ingredient comes from, the climate, the weather, the soil, even the people. It is the same with food,” she says. “I wanted to look at how to introduce wine to a table without disrespecting the harmony and the integrity of the dishes.”