This is a great point. I think Dim Sum basically means a style of preparing a meal in small bite sized items on small plates - it’s a style of cooking/eating similar in a sense to sushi or tapas. It includes everything from BBQ pork to steamed duck to shrimp dumplings to sweet baked buns to Chinese broccoli with oyster sauce to glutinous rice inside a banana leaf to deep fried crab claws and on and on.
Different things are going to match different wines more and less perfectly, but of course, you aren’t going to have a different wine to go with each thing. I expect most of the main categories discussed in this thread would work well enough - Champagne, Riesling, high acid chardonnay, Loire chenin, and so forth. It’s not going to be exacting food wine pairing Nirvana, but it should work perfectly well.
Most of the nicer dim sum places (is, any place you’d have wine) you just order from a menu. While it’s arguable it may lessen the experience, it’s definitely more conducive for wine.
It was inevitable that the “don’t drink wine just drink beer/tea/whatever” posts would arrive, but at least we had a decent number of actually responsive and helpful posts first.
I agree with the folks who said that tea is a good accompaniment, but that’s because I usually have the stuff in the afternoon or morning.
However, we do sometimes have it for dinner, or some kind of Chinese dumplings, and we have all kinds of wine with it. Not all of it matches, but you don’t have to think it’s not going to work. Har Kow may be good with a white, chicken feet or duck feet can be good with an oloroso sherry, meatballs can be good with a number of reds, various kinds of bao can work with either or with rosé, wu gok is almost like meat and potatoes, lo bak go includes mushrooms and maybe dried shrimp and/or sausage and is pretty good with older Rioja - it’s just possible to have many matches. And there are plenty of dim sum recipes with mushrooms, which go with a lot of reds and whites, or dry shrimp, which have an entirely different flavor profile from fresh shrimp.
My Dim Sum experiences are somewhat limited- they almost always happen at Ping in NYC at lunchtime or a place nearby whose name escapes me- but Brad Kane took me there once and at this point I could almost walk there blindfolded even if I cannot recall the name. So take this with that caveat.
After much experimentation for me the magical choice is Mosel Spatlese- Fritz Haag in particular works out wonderfully for some reason.
That said- in the interests of being honest as others have been, I drink more tea than I do wine at these meals. The wine works and makes for a nice experience, but the couple of times I tried to turn a Dim Sum experience into a wine tasting- it did not work out nearly as well as having a bit of very nice wine to go with the tea.
I find that people pointing out that not all foods, especially how non-European foods are served in the US, are good pairings for wine or require very careful menu selections to be very important and helpful. I don’t find it all helpful if someone just throws out “X with Y” when the choices are so diverse and call for very different decisions.
I’ve seen variations of this over many years. Many people trying to shoehorn wines where they do not really belong or roundly ignoring advice in order to just do a pairing cuz need to show off a cellar selection. Not everything has been created in the niche European traditions of grape x in terroir y = foods z.
Charlie made the point I would. When pairing with Asian foods it pays to focus on certain dishes. Trying to conclude wines from a certain region match foods from certain sorts of restaurants invariably leads to disappointment.
I found Alsatian Gewruz paired with good Peking Duck to be probably one of the best pairings I will have in this lifetime. But I don’t remember that wine working with all the other dishes we’d have at a pass the dish sort of feast at a Chinese restaurant. People should be told that instead of just having the last experience each reader has had thrown at them with no context.
Very often the traditions of the culture in question are the very best choices. Tea for Asian foods. Lagers with Mexican food. etc.
Not everything has been created in the niche European traditions of grape x in terroir y = foods z.
Charlie made the point I would. When pairing with Asian foods it pays to focus on certain dishes. Trying to conclude wines from a certain region match foods from certain sorts of restaurants invariably leads to disappointment
This.
Doesn’t mean there’s no wine that works, but there’s no reason to force a pairing. There’s a lot of food from the West Indies that just doesn’t work with wine.
And it also doesn’t mean you can’t just drink what you want and forget about a perfect pairing.
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