What Wines Work Best With The Dry Heat Of Western Chinese Cooking? Plenty.
For years I have been a devotee of the addictive Spicy & Tingly Noodles at New York City's Xi'an Famous Foods. And as I got to know Jason Wang, who runs the business with his father David, I was excited to pick his brain about the spices and other ingredients that made their dishes so distinctive. Before I could ask about any culinary secrets, though, Jason had his own questions for me: which wines would I recommend he pour by the glass at his sit-down restaurant Biang! in Flushing, Queens? Most New York sommeliers have strong opinions on what to drink with Peking duck (often fueled by the B.Y.O.B policy at the legendary Peking Duck House in Chinatown). But the food at Biang! combines the dry heat of Szechuan cooking with spices like cumin. I was stumped.
We agreed on a pretty simple solution — bring a bunch of wine, and some friends, to the garden at Biang! and order everything on the menu. My go-to on Chinese cuisine is another Jason, Jason Hua, the Chef de Cuisine at The Dutch. We also brought our colleague Justin Sievers, who desperately needed a break from managing the opening of Bar Primi — along with our friend Dominique Ansel, who was still glowing after the first birthday of the Cronut™ (or maybe it was just the sun). It was the warmest day of the spring thus far, and Jason had us set us up in the back garden. I started popping corks, and certain suspicions were confirmed immediately.
Champagne is always the ringer, and since we were all thirsty my last bottle of Jerome Prevost's La Closerie, a varietal wine made from the oft-overlooked Pinot Meunier, was dispatched with quickly. As soon as the meat skewers and quail eggs on toast started appearing, though, it was clear that the austerity of good Champagne was lost on this table.
A little residual sugar is the easiest way to deal with spicy food, and there are few sweet wines more satisfying than the fizzy Bugey-Cerdon, a Gamay-based sparkling wine from Eastern France. I didn't have my favorite, from Renardat-Fâche (which usually sells out soon after it arrives on this side of the Atlantic), but a curious replacement from one of the more exciting winemakers in Beaujolais, J.P. Brun. Whether at his Terres Dorées estate in Charnay, just North of Lyon, or at his late godfather's Louis Clerc in Côte-Rôtie, he has been making very fashionable wines at reasonable prices. His FRV, a pink sparkling Gamay, is not made like a Champagne, but rather uses the "ancestrale" style, resulting in a lower-alcohol, slightly sweet, 100% pleasurable accompaniment to the food at Biang!
The first white, which is ironically made from skinless red grapes, was Dominique's favorite, and the only leftover bottle I could get him to take home: Teutonic's 2011 "White Blend" from the Willamette Valley in Oregon. Pinot Noir, pressed in the style of a Blanc de Noir, makes up 70% of the blend, and Müller-Thurgau, the Central European workhorse, the remaining 30%. Something about the quality of the Pinot Noir's aromatics was perfect with the lamb dumplings.
It became clear that lean, high acid whites, though, weren't going to work once the cumin-inflected and irresistible lamb-burgers hit the table. Wieninger's Vienna-grown blend of Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc and Chardonnay was no match for the flavors on the table, and a decent bottle of Chablis never even made it out of the box. An Edelzwicker, or field blend, from the renowned Albert Boxler in Alsace, France was perhaps my favorite white on the table, though. The composition of an Edelzwicker varies from producer to producer, vineyard to vineyard, and, in Boxler's case, vintage to vintage, but it typically includes the locally popular varieties of Riesling, Pinot Blanc and Gewurtztraminer. It was the Muscat, though, in the 11 we tasted at Biang!, that instead of fighting with the spicy heat of the noodles, layered it beautifully with new notes of honey and white flowers.
The other wine that disappeared quickly was a no-brainer: sweet German Riesling with a little bit of age on it; in this case, Zilliken's Spätlese from the Saarburger Rausch vineyard, 2002. What to do, though, for those that don't like wines that have residual sugar in the double-digit grams per liter? Texture was the key, and even some favorite local dry Riseling, and Pinot Blanc from a respected grower in the Dolomites weren't thick enough to stand up to Spicy & Tingly.
It was about then when Jason's father, who had been supervising the kitchen, appeared with some off-menu grilled corn-on-the-cob, that we finally found something that worked. Roussane was the variety that saved the day, a Rhone and California favorite found, in this case, in Savoie, in the French Alps. Adrien Berlioz, a young winemaker from a regionally-big winemaking family, has been hitting it out of the park with reds and whites at the Cellier des Cray, but the 2011 Chignin-Bergeron (Chignin is the nearest village, Bergeron a local name for Roussanne), with its creamy, lemon-curd-like acidity was unexpectedly perfect on the spicy and sunny table. Its friends Marsanne and Viognier, if made without a ton of new oak, might work as well.
The looming question though, as we dug into the famous noodles, was "Red?"
It had to be done, of course, and there were more misses in this category than hits for sure. Oregon Pinot Noir wasn't horrible. And good, old Burgundy would have been a waste. Beaujolais was better, and perhaps in the Nouveau season I would have been able to bring along something like Domaine du Vissoux's Vielles Vignes Beaujolais Primeur, but we'll have to wait for the 2014's. Unexpectedly, of wines in the lighter category, the winner was definitely a Merenzao, a Spanish name for Trousseau, from Ronsel do Sil, in Ribeira Sacra. The wine's name, Alpendre, is a reference to the Galician rural lean-tos that local farmers have kept their tools in for hundreds of years, and its rusticity was in service to Jason's food. The earthiness, paired with the naturally high acidity of Trousseau (think Jura) worked, even if it didn't really make sense.
The Rhone was a logical favorite, and the basic VdF Syrah from the aforementioned Louis Clerc in Côte-Rôtie. Brun's clean, natural style doesn't work well with Gamay exclusively, and once again, the absence of wood-tannin because of an élevage in exclusively old barrels is critical. A much more expensive bottle of single-vineyard Californian Syrah might have seemed like an improvement, with its riper core of fruit, but the modest application of some fancy French oak didn't really fly. Perhaps a very juicy Grenache, whether it be modern French or new-school Californian, might be appropriate (I think of Vallin' light and pretty expression from Santa Barbara), but Zinfandel was by far the winner. The only wine blended from multiple sites that the legendary Ridge releases is its Three Valleys cuvee from Sonoma, made up of multiple very old vineyard sites, and technically a blend including historic, and mostly Rhone-inflected, varieties like Mourvèdre, or Mataro, which lend structure to Zinfandel's bodacious blueberry fruit. One of my favorite dishes of the day came near the end of the meal, a salad of cold lamb with bean sprouts, cilantro, and some of XFF's proprietary sauces. In the late afternoon sun, it was a perfect combo.
The pièce de résistance was a surprise even to Jason — and chef Hua and I totally borrowed it for our Memorial Day Luau at The Dutch. David brought up a watermelon, elegantly carved and full of a fluffy watermelon puree blended with a rice liqueur. It was delicious, but I took an etiquette risk and adulterated it with a splash of the sparkling FRV. The fizzy sweetness gave the drink even more texture, and although there were sweet rice cakes, I was just fine with having punch for dessert.
As we were chatting and divvying up the absurd amount of leftover wine, a server brought a newspaper clipping to Jason that a customer had dropped off from an interview he had done with a big Swedish newspaper. Conveniently, one of our guests was a native Swede, and translated a glowing review of Biang! One word the journalist used stuck out to all of us: addictive. I ate my weight in noodles and skewers, but when I got back to the city I was contemplating a Xi'an Famous Foods run for dinner, eyeing the leftover Boxler in the fridge.
Contributor Chad Walsh writes about wine and other beverages. He is also beverage manager for The Dutch in NYC.