Cuisine, Culture & Wine

This weekend I went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant and even though we had been drinking wine before, I found myself ordering a cocktail. Indian food is notoriously spicy and as much as I enjoy wine, I never find I like it with Indian food.

It brought me back to a question I had which is how much a country or culture's cuisine influences its appetite for different types of wine. Kairos - a consulting agency - states that Indians drink more white and rosé in the summer relative to red wines (a part of this likely due to the weather), and also have an appetite for dessert wines. But how much of this is due to a better pairing with cuisine?

I looked to China for a parallel and here we seem to see mixed results. In Shanghai they have a higher preferences for white wines than the rest of China, apparently attributable to food that is more acidic. However, in southern parts of China they have high preference for tannic red wines, even though the cuisine can be similarly spicy to Indian food. This preference seems to be linked to a taste for black tea, which can also be quite bitter.

In prior classes we talked about Chinese preference for red Bordeaux and branding being a piece of this, but even in the US, Asians seems to prefer wine that is more tannic and enjoy fruity and sweet wine less often.

Maybe then, our wine preferences are based less on what pairs well with the food we eat and have more to do with the flavors we naturally find in our cuisine. Indians enjoy sugary desserts and eat higher acidity, less bitter food than in China. This may explain why I tried to order a glass of wine at a country club in India, all they had to offer was Port.