I often hear stories told by wine professionals about how their earliest exposure to wine involved a grandparent who let them taste a spoonful when they were young, which maybe planted a seed that they would eventually revisit later in their life. Others involve stories of someone’s “aha” wine, or the wine so profound that it inspired them to get into wine, whether it be a simple Chardonnay or a rare Puligny-Montrachet. Neither of these have sparked that beginning for me, to be honest, partly because wine culture never seriously permeated my family’s traditions, but more so because it was the idea of wine itself that I gravitated towards: the fact that wine was a drinkable intersection between art, science, culture, and gastronomy was one that soothed my overly curious mind – the stereotypical mind that switched courses and majors way too many times.
As a younger queer person in university, perhaps it was my version of turning towards a form of art and beauty I thought was more accessible to me, or perhaps it was a drunken escape far away from the other side of the spectrum of frat boys and beer. Or both. Regardless, I eventually started taking Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET) courses, and became the president of my university’s wine tasting club.
Wearing a leather jacket passed down from my dad’s days in the 80s, I remember bracing for a cold yet sunny January day that I told myself mirrored that of Alsace’s climate. Coming from a coding lab, where we were learning how to build an app utilizing Google Maps, I remember getting a call that I got the job to work at a liquor store in Vancouver’s West End, which became my first industry gig. I eventually worked at a more inspiring boutique liquor store on the other side of the city: I once skipped a university lecture in order to go to a portfolio tasting at work, and the wines made me viscerally react from the simple fact that I didn’t realize wines could taste that way.
The Puzelat-Bonhomme 2011 Cheverny Blanc, a 90/10 blend of Sauvignon Blanc and the rarer Menu Pineau, was the first wine that gave me this intersection of ripe grapefruit, macerated orange, and honey drizzled over herbs. I begged the buyer of the wine shop to bring it in, promising to hand sell it to customers and to buy at least a couple of bottles for myself, which I did. I even mentioned it during the practical portion of my certified sommelier exam when I was asked to suggest a wine to pair alongside risotto with spring peas, because I was that enamoured by it.
I tried the Natalino del Prete “Il Pioniere” during the same tasting, a blend of Negroamaro and Malvasia Nera from Salice Salentino in Italy’s Puglia. It was the first wine that gave me this almost ineffably grotesque and leathery animalistic shock balanced with the intensity of earthy pencil shavings and dark fruit, a divisiveness that spilled into the customers I excitedly suggested it to. Ever since I attempted to spread the gospel of this southern Italian wine at the time, some folks came in searching just for that particular wine because they liked it as much as I did, but other folks – including a sommelier in the city – came in just to rant about how “flawed” it was. Geez.
I guess those two bottles have been some of the wines that have defined part of my path in the world of wine and flavour. I remember lugging The World Atlas of Wine from lecture to lecture in my second year of university, and I distinctly remember reading about the soils of Beaujolais in an algorithms class. I did my best to integrate my interest in wine with whatever else I was studying, including coding sommelier chatterbots in Java and trying to relate viticulture to a vascular plants course, but I knew I had lost my patience during the final exam of another algorithms class, where I gave up and wrote an essay about the different types of Cabernet Sauvignon instead. I also skipped that vascular plants exam to attend my first WSET diploma class. Do I regret it? Nah.
Despite that moment, I still retained this curiosity for wine and flavour with this scientific lens, which led me to cofound a start-up with the aim of recreating wines and spirits from the molecular level, but wine’s cultural impacts and how we might approach the subject from different perspectives while dismantling white supremacy have also become big interests of mine.
After going on a date with someone within the first months of my move to San Francisco, I realized how fucked up it was that he knew more about Filipino geography than I did, even though we didn’t delve as deeply as we could in its history while growing up, nor were we taught Tagalog. I gave a serious pause. Why do I know more about France’s soil types and appellations than Filipino geography?
As embarrassing as that may have been to admit just now, this was my “aha” moment, where I knew I had to dig deeper into my identity and culture, change the way I looked at wine, and discover how to reinterpret wine through my own identity. And to put in that work.
Classic Filipino adobo uses some core ingredients: soy sauce and vinegar as the flavour canvas, with brush strokes from bay leaves, peppercorns, and garlic. Adobong dilaw (yellow adobo) uses turmeric instead of soy sauce, while adobong puti (white adobo) forgoes any soy sauce for a lighter version of the dish, though I’ve seen recipes that use other aromatic spices to add a different energy.
Adobong pula, or red adobo, uses annatto (or achuete) instead of soy sauce, which gives the dish an earthy and slightly resinous note. The recipe that I used also suggests adding red miso and liver paste in order to lean into the meaty themes, in the same way that the adobong dilaw recipe I referred to used mushrooms to lean into the orbit of this fresher and more herbal tone of earthiness. This particular iteration of adobong pula uses lamb shanks, and the dish undergoes a long braise lasting a couple of hours to marry the flavours and tenderize the meat.
This type of adobo apparently comes from the Ilonggo or Hiligaynon people from the central Philippines, where my dad’s side of the family is from.
With our Filipino food and wine experiments so far, I’m becoming more and more comfortable with skipping over reds because the sharpness of the vinegar in Filipino cuisine tends to smother them unless one goes great lengths to mould the pairings. We’ve also generally learned that bold and present – yet relaxed and moderately-volumed – white wines are normally a winning combination. Chardonnay from California’s Arroyo Grande Valley went spectacularly with classic adobong manok, for example, with its New World frankness coupled with cool restraint, while the slightly earthier and zestier turmeric-based adobong dilaw paired well with a classic Alsatian Pinot Gris, which mirrored the subtle earthiness while adding a pinch of ripe fruit to balance the dish out. The earthier components in this dish almost make me veer towards a Chardonnay, part 2: the remix, but the heavier direction of this recipe’s iteration makes me veer towards France’s Rhône Valley.
I almost want this to be Viognier’s comeback moment with its pinnacle in the form as the broad and creamy Condrieu, but past experience has shown me that flowery perfume and pungent vinegar notes can be tricky; and then white Hermitage is tempting as well, where fine honeyed and waxy notes make a hefty extrapolation of the classic adobo and Chardonnay pairing – something I know this dish could easily handle. That being said, both of these options are a bit pricey.
I take a step back and look at other adobong pula recipes, and I have to consider that some variations aren’t as rich, nor do many of them use lamb, which is comparatively cooked less often than other meats in the Philippines, anyway. Staying on theme, I choose a white Saint-Joseph from the Northern Rhône which is primarily Roussanne. As with some previous dishes, I expect the slight phenolic bitterness from the grape to synergize with the bitterness in the dish – in this case, it’s from the achuete oil.
J.L. Chave Sélection 2018 “Circa” Saint-Joseph Blanc (Rhône Valley, France) Oct 2020. $30 USD.
Around 60% Roussanne and 40% Marsanne. There’s something on the nose so specific but also supremely difficult to place: it’s almost as if a fat piece of dried mango and a few slices of fresh pear are briefly dipped in extra virgin olive oil and then steeped in earl grey tea. And when I say creaminess, here, I mean it, both texturally and in flavour – the wine is waxy and rotund, ending on a distinct dried flower tea-like bitterness on the end. 14.5% ABV, but silky and balanced.
As I’m testing out this pairing, my partner, working in the living room, chooses a disco hits playlist to get his energy going, and I can’t help but think that it’s a perfect analogy to what’s happening in my mouth. The rustic and meaty richness of the lamb meets the subtle decadence of the wine, and it’s all silky bass riffs meeting silky bass riffs. I’m no expert on disco, but to me, disco maintains a particular profuseness of energy without spilling into jagged peaks or valleys. That’s what this pairing is like: all velvet and excitement. In this iteration of the dish, the oft-sour notes of adobo are tamed by the bitterness and savoury additions, so the lowish acid of the wine matches the volume of the dish.
Testing out this pairing in the middle of an autumn Bay Area heat wave is making me sweat, but I can’t help but think this is a perfect pairing for frigid weather, especially because white wines in the middle of winter are severely underrated. Red wines? I’ll take my red adobo, thank you very much.