There are no short cuts

by PHILIP WHITE - This was published in The Independent Weekly in January 2008

Check the wisdom of the Chinese gastronome, Lu Yü, writing* 1200 years ago: “There are nine ways by which man must tax himself when he has to do with tea.

“He must manufacture it. He must develop a sense of selectivity and discrimination about it. He must provide the proper implements. He must prepare the right kind of fire. He must select a suitable water. He must roast the tea to a turn. He must grind it well. He must brew it to its ultimate perfection. He must, finally, drink it. There are no short cuts.”

Our wine exporters would have done much better in China had they first studied this key to the Chinese thirst.

Tea, its agricultural, cultural lure and lore, its intricate trade pathways, its rites and respectability, were revered in China for millennia before Lu Yü swapped his tea brush for the calligrapher’s.

Halfway through his elegant, particular essay on the selection of natural waters, and the three stages of boiling it, I took a call from an Italian Australian bloke I’d never met, seeking roughly an oil tanker full of stupidly cheap Australian wine to send to China. Lu Yü’s water chapter showed much more intelligence, raw science, and selectivity than this greedy peanut showed the grog he wanted.

Too many Ocker plonkmongers regard China with the disdain our ancestors showed, addicting them to opium to avoid paying cash for our addiction to tea. Got a tank of rotten red? “Sweeten it, fizz it up, put a dragon on it and sell it to the Chinese”.

China is perfectly capable of making its own wine of this quality. It needs no more. Its grape harvest is roughly the same size as Australia’s, and given water, it can expand to greater proportions than ours. Since Mao, many French and Australian winemakers, usually barely known in their homelands, have helped boot the Chinese wine business up as the Chinese develop a thirst for the grape and its product.

Before they adapt their own tasteful tea ethic to wine, and suddenly get millennia ahead of us in the style stakes, it would have been nice if we’d also assisted them in “developing a sense of selectivity and discrimination” about wine.

We must also “provide the proper implements”. Five years back I discovered the great corkscrew and wine glass shortage: there seemed to be one corkscrew in Shanghai, another in Beijing, and the third one was lost. Red was served in thimble-sized ceramics designed for quaffing powerful rice spirits, which they call wine. Nobody knew China exported millions of corkscrews, decanters, and wine glasses.

The exceptions were more likely to ooze your nebbiolo into the appropriate Reidel. This rise of the groovy new capitalist has seen a boom of young Chinese who’ve traveled enough to know about such things, but these are mostly in the biggest cities, and are restricted to modern restaurant enclaves as you see in Shanghai.

I marveled to one rural official about the giant scope of change China was managing, suddenly swapping Mao for capitalism. “Change?” he retorted “Change? Not much change Mr. White. Plenty of change over the last five thousand years. But not lately. Not last century. Mao was a misogynist with a beer gut. He is gone.”

Of course many of these Chinese are formidable tea aficionados, and are just as likely to attend a formal tea house, with its varying degree of ritual, as they are to do deep wine bar. Either way, they’re thirsty only for a product that has been brewed “to its ultimate perfection”. They don’t want cheap sweet red fizz.

Peter Gago, the Grange maker, recently showed me the newest, most expensive Chinese wine: made from varieties we grow, to very high standards indeed; sold for hundreds of dollars in packaging more posh than any Australian export. It’s happening very quickly.

When you visit a great Chinese tea garden, you can’t help realising how quickly such specialists will master the finer aspects of viticulture. Like priceless, unique vineyards, you’ll find a certain type of tea meticulously grown, organically, in fast-draining red dirt over limestone, with a southerly aspect, managed by the one family for … how many years? You’ll more likely get the name of a dynasty than a decade.

Just as we delve the arcane wonders of China tea, so will we soon be drinking fine China wine, and I’m not talking fiery rice spirit. The race between who will supply what to whom is best called by Lu Yü: there are no short cuts, and it’ll be won by the country which can select the most suitable water. Oh, and China has recently procured the Himalaya.

It also seems to own all the money in the United States.

* Classic of Tea - Francis Ross Carpenter translation, Little Brown, 1974

And ever the twain shall meet

by PHILIP WHITE

In the late ’seventies, when Tony Bilson worked the pans at the mighty Berowra Waters Inn, serving French-influenced cuisine with European-style wines, we developed contentious theories about wine not marrying harmoniously to Chinese cuisine.

After Shen Nong discovered the importance of boiling drinking water for good health 3,000 years back, it wasn’t long before some Camellia sinensis fell into the pot and teas began to evolve alongside Chinese regional dishes.

We felt that food which had developed over millennia with tea would only work with wine if it became more tea-like. Our new “fruit-driven” wines were heading further away from tea in structure.

In 1998 Senior Professor Bert Vallee, of the Harvard Medical School, reported that many Asians did not produce the dehydrogenase which processes alcohol in the liver. As tea-drinkers, there was no need for their DNA to switch the mechanism on. But the smallest shot of grog made them very drunk, and sick until their skin managed to sweat the poison out.

European cultures, in contrast, developed in filthy big cities where the water was lethal. Although tea was common on posh tables by 1700, Round Eyes didn’t understand the importance of boiling water until Pasteur. Since the Georgians began drinking wine in about 5,000BC, we’d evolved drinking fermented brews, with all their vitamins, minerals and antioxidant tannins. Vallee even suggested that "…throughout western history the normal state of mind may have been one of inebriation".

In contrast, the Chinese may have been wide awake with kung-fu chai, but they were relatively sober and healthy until we hit them with opium, which we took there from India - to swap for tea - until 1908.

While this seemed to reinforce our theory, twenty years of determined thirsty travel in the meantime taught me that China, and Asia, have teas of a much wider range of flavours, colours, and textures than anybody ever dreamed of achieving in wines.

There are fatty, cheesy teas that taste like big malo-lactic chardonnays; unfermented green teas as crisp and savoury as verdelho or sauvignon blanc; pu-erh teas like plummy, tarry shiraz; teas as nutty and cherry-like as pinot noir. The aged cake teas of Yunnan can be as sweet, leathery and meaty as mourvedre or muscat; good jasmine can be as floral and spicy as Alsace gewürztraminer; some chrysanthemum teas are like aged pinot gris.

So, to think backwards, any Asian cuisine that grew up with teas like those should just as easily be enjoyed with such wines.

The human mouth detects sweet, sour, salt, bitter, water, chilli heat, and umami (a combination of glutamates - like MSG - and ribonucleotides). Just as these totally natural flavours harmonise in good food, they make up the pleasant aspects of good tea and wine.

But the trick of successfully marrying them on the table is as much about texture as actual flavour. So the viscosity, or the oiliness of the food and drink, and the degree of polymerisation, or softening, of its naturally preservative tannins, provide vital keys to the sort of cuisine you can experience at the table of a genius like Cheong.

Even the dreaded “fruit-drivens”, like sauvignon blanc, simple rosé, or unwooded chardonnay, often go very well with the spicy, chilli, ginger and verbena cuisines of Thailand and Malaysia, which have traditionally been eaten with fresh fruit juices as much as simpler teas.

Acids are also very important. Leaner ones, like ascorbic, tartaric and malic, dominate sauvignon blanc and riesling, while the fatty amino acids that we first taste in mother’s milk occur in wines which have undergone the secondary, or malo-lactic fermentation, in which bacteria, not yeast, convert the hard, metallic, malic acid of chardonnay or red grapes to the softer lactic acid of milk.

With acid and viscosity, the clever host might just as well devise a contrasting effect as much as a harmonious marriage. If you’re serving a fatty fish, like European carp, or steamed flounder, you can choose whether to bolster that characteristic with a big fat pinot gris or peachy wood-aged chardonnay, or provide a piquant counterpoint with a crunchy sauvignon blanc, its acid like the oxalic flavour of rhubarb, to slice through the fat of the bottom-feeding flounder, with its guts full of bottom-of-the sea roadkill.

Similarly, the fat of bottom-feeding ducks or pigs can be contrasted or reinforced, which is why they go so well with pinot noir, which can be either chubby with malo fat or more austere and steely, like riesling.

But in the end, while the secret may seem a mysterious marriage of new science and ancient gastronomic dreaming, you can forget it if your ingredients aren’t the very best. Start fresh, clean, and organic and your journey of exploration will be much less hazardous than mine. But I’m not compaining.