The classical art of pairing assumes the food will arrive one dish at a time, in an orderly fashion, like guests at a formal reception. Much of Asia never agreed to eat this way.

The well-behaved meal

The classical idea of food and wine pairing is wonderfully orderly. Food arrives one plate at a time, like well-behaved guests at a formal reception. Oysters meet Chablis, fish encounters white Burgundy, lamb finds Bordeaux, and cheese is introduced to something suitably mature and expensive. Each couple is allowed a little private time together before the next one arrives.

When this works, it can be extraordinary. There are combinations of food and wine that seem to produce a third flavour neither possessed independently — the acidity softens, the fruit suddenly becomes more vivid, something salty brings out something sweet — and for a few seconds you understand why people devote their lives to thinking about such things.

‍ ‍ “But much of Asia never agreed to eat this way.”

At a Thai table, you may have a green papaya salad, grilled pork, a coconut curry, fried fish, sticky rice and something so spicy that the person opposite you has quietly stopped talking. Sour, sweet, salty, fermented, fatty and incendiary are not separate courses. They are dinner.

Indian food creates its own problems, since a single plate may contain something creamy, something smoky, something pickled and a chutney powerful enough to alter the personality of whatever touches it. Korean barbecue is more mischievous still, because you assemble the food yourself. A piece of beef becomes lettuce, ssamjang, kimchi and raw garlic, and the next mouthful contains completely different proportions because you have become overconfident with the kimchi. What, exactly, are you pairing the wine with? The beef? The fermented soybean paste? The fact that you have somehow eaten eight pieces while insisting you were going to have only three?

And Chinese banquets may be the greatest challenge of all, because they operate on a culinary principle that translates roughly as everything, everywhere, all at once. There is no reason the steamed fish should wait patiently for you to finish the roast meats. The vegetables certainly will not. The crab arrives when the crab arrives, and the noodles appear after everybody has declared themselves completely full, whereupon everyone eats noodles.

Trying to organise a series of perfect wine pairings around this is less like being a sommelier and more like directing air traffic.

A different question

Perhaps, then, the problem is not the meal. Perhaps it is our idea of pairing. The European tradition developed alongside a particular structure of dining, and if food arrives sequentially it makes perfect sense for the wine to do the same. But once the dishes begin sharing a table, the question changes. Instead of asking what is the perfect wine for this dish, perhaps we ought to ask what we can happily drink while eating all of this.

This sounds like lowering our standards. I am beginning to think it may be raising them.

A drink that accompanies a communal meal needs a different set of virtues. It must be flexible rather than perfect, refreshing rather than demanding. It needs enough acidity to deal with fat, enough character not to disappear beside spice, and enough restraint not to quarrel with every dish on the table. Above all, it needs stamina.

Champagne happens to possess most of these qualities, which may explain why people who claim Champagne goes with everything are so irritatingly difficult to disprove. It is excellent with fried food, beautiful with seafood, surprisingly good with dim sum, and it has an almost supernatural ability to make lunch feel as though something important has occurred. Champagne also pairs exceptionally well with potato chips eaten directly from the packet, which should probably tell us something about how seriously we need to take all of this.

Sake is another remarkably good answer, and this should hardly be surprising. Sake evolved beside food rather than being introduced to it later by somebody carrying a tasting grid. Good sake moves comfortably from something delicate to something grilled, fried or deeply savoury without continually demanding attention. It does not need the fish to stop being fish when the chicken arrives. The range is enormous, of course — a fragrant daiginjo behaves nothing like a rich junmai, and temperature changes everything — but sake often possesses the quality most valuable at a busy table: it knows when to get out of the way.

This is an underrated skill in both drinks and people.

On ice, and other scandals

Beer understands it too. There are few pairings more immediately convincing than cold lager and spicy food. Nobody needs to explain the chemistry. You take a bite, you drink, you feel better, you take another bite.

In much of Southeast Asia, the beer may also contain ice. This causes distress among certain drinkers, who will explain that the ice dilutes the beer. This is true. It is also, usually, the point. Sit outdoors in Bangkok, Saigon or Phnom Penh when the evening temperature has barely dropped below thirty degrees, and philosophical objections to ice begin to feel less urgent. The beer stays cold, the dilution makes it lighter, and you continue eating.

Notice, too, that we accept dilution as an essential element of whisky drinking, and spend ridiculous sums on beautifully engineered cubes of crystal-clear ice designed specifically to melt into alcohol. Put two ordinary cubes into a lager, however, and people start behaving as though an international treaty has been violated.

Temperature matters. Context matters more. A crisp beer beside a charcoal grill tastes different from the same beer in a hotel ballroom. Champagne at lunch is a different drink from Champagne at midnight. Whisky tastes noticeably better when somebody else is paying.

The quiet professional

Which brings us to tea — the world's greatest food-pairing drink that nobody bothers calling a food-pairing drink. Consider what wine professionals look for: tannin, acidity, fragrance, bitterness, freshness, something capable of cutting through richness and resetting the palate between mouthfuls. Tea has been quietly doing all of this for centuries. A pot of pu'er does not panic when the duck arrives before the fish is finished. Oolong travels across several dishes without requiring a change of glass. Green tea accompanies an entire Japanese meal without anyone wheeling over a trolley to explain that the leaves came from a southeast-facing slope where the farmer's grandfather had strong opinions about soil.

I enjoy those stories. Really, I do. Wine would be much poorer without them. But sometimes the fish is getting cold, and there is a point at which a drink needs to remember that dinner is happening. The most complicated negotiations tend to begin with chilli. Wine and chilli have a notoriously difficult relationship, and considerable intellectual effort has been spent brokering the peace. Residual sugar can help, lower alcohol can help, aromatic whites can be excellent, certain rosés work beautifully, and there are reds that survive. This is all useful information.

There is also another possibility: drink something else. A beer, a sake, a highball, tea, water. The Burgundy will not be offended. It has waited several years already and can probably manage until tomorrow. The Japanese highball may be the purest expression of this philosophy. Whisky, soda, ice. It looks almost absurdly simple, although anyone who has watched a serious Japanese bartender make one knows that simplicity can involve an alarming amount of concentration. The temperature matters, the ice matters, the carbonation matters, the glass matters, even the way it is stirred matters. A great deal of thought goes into producing something the drinker does not have to think very much about.

‍ ‍ “That strikes me as rather civilised. You eat. You drink. You continue.”

‍ ‍“And if you cannot decide what to drink with eleven dishes at once, there is always Champagne. Or sake. Or beer. Or tea. Nobody at the table is keeping score. They are too busy eating.”