Brigitta and Karl Steininger of Weingut Steininger in Langenlois, Kamptal, Austria were in town (Washington DC) on the eve of the Chinese New Year of the Snake for a week and Janet Cam of Janet Cam Consulting used the opportunity to host a Chinese food and Austrian wine-pairing buffet dinner at her home to showcase how well Chinese food goes with Austrian wines. 

Janet did the cooking and Brigitta and Karl brought the wines. 

Annette and I visited Weingut Steiniger during Austria 2023 by ombiasy WineTours.

See:  

Tour and Tasting at Weingut Steininger, Kamptal, with Brigitta Steininger - Austria 2023 by ombiasy WineTours

At Loisium Wine & Spa Resort Langenlois, Kamptal: Impromptu Steininger Sekt Reception with Eva Steininger and Klaus Wittauer - Austria 2023 by ombiasy WineTours

Dave McIntyre published an interesting article entitled "Wines for Chinese Year" on his new website, in which he also refers extensively to Janet Cam (see below).

It was a wonderful evening, with great food, wines and company. Thanks JK and Janet for inviting us.

Initiation by Janet Cam

Dear Wine Friends –

Brigitta and Karl Steininger are in town on the eve of the Chinese New Year of the Snake.  Several of you have heard me sing the praises of Austrian wines.  Following the excellent German wine tour with Annette and Christian Schiller, JK and I went to Austria.  KW Selections importer, Klaus Wittauer, suggested I attend the September OTW Single Vineyard Summit at the Grafenegg Castle.  5 days, 600 wines to be evaluated and scored.  I was in the room with Stephan Reinhardt, wine critic for Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate.  I averaged 42 wines a day leaving early for winery appointments.  I gave 100 points to only two wines. One was Steininger’s  2023 Ried Heiligenstein, Kamptal Riesling.  On the same day I rated this wine, the afternoon appointment was with Brigitta Steininger.  You can imagine my excitement to share my finding.  Following the tasting I invited Brigitta and Karl to join us for Chinese New Year.  

Following a public tasting, JK and I are hosting a buffet dinner for you to meet them and enjoy their wines.  Klaus will bring some magnums, Nick Materese of Siema will dig into his cellar for older vintages and if it you would like to bring a bottle to share that would be wonder-full.  Brigitta is fond of bubbles (we share that) and Karl enjoys a well made focused wine. 

Wines for Chinese New Year

It's not as difficult as you think

The other annoying Lunar New Year ritual is firecrackers. When my wife and I lived in Taipei in 1985-86, we made the mistake of going to bed early on Lunar New Year’s Eve. At the stroke of midnight, the people in the apartment above dropped a string of firecrackers off their balcony. The cacaphony lasted for hours as the entire city celebrated, the night sky lighting up until smoke obscured it. The next morning, a group of teenagers took sport in aiming a cascade of bottle rockets at the foreigner walking down the street ankle deep in fragments of red paper from the night’s firecrackers.

New Year’s food is much more fun. Certain dishes are traditional because they supposedly bring you good luck: Dumplings bring wealth because they resemble traditional Chinese silver ingots. (If this myth were true, I would be wealthy enough to have attended the recent presidential inauguration, because I’ve eaten a fortune’s worth of my Taiwanese mother-in-law’s dumplings over the decades. But hey, symbolism is important.) Spring rolls, named for the Spring Festival, resemble gold bars.

The Mandarin word for fish is a homonym for surplus, so you’ll often see fish on a Lunar New Year menu. Same with chicken, a homonym for luck. At the end of the two weeks, a dessert of glutinous rice balls filled with red bean paste symbolizes family, a sweet show of togetherness before family members depart until the next Spring Festival.

Pairing wines with Chinese food isn’t difficult, you just need to move away from the idea of matching a wine with a particular dish and look for flexible wines that play nice with various flavors and spices. Chinese meals typically feature several dishes on the table simultaneously rather than courses in a formal procession in the French style. That calls for versatility.

“I like the fun factor of opening several wines and discovering unexpected pairings with the variety of food in a Chinese meal,” says Janet Cam, a restaurant consultant whose career included managing Washington D.C.’s Le Pavillon, a nouvelle cuisine pioneer, and New York’s iconic Lutèce. She attributes her love of food to her Cantonese upbringing in southern California.

“Madeira is my preference with Sichuan cuisine,” Cam says, adding that Madeira’s oxidative style helps it stand up to Sichuan’s numbing heat. (I’ve found fruity rosés can work well, oddly enough.) With Cantonese food’s more subtle and complex flavors, Cam favors mature wines from the Old World or fruity current releases from Austria or the Finger Lakes. And of course, champagne. To quote my own mantra, “Bubbles go with everything!”

Cam presented an assortment of popular dim sum items with six wines at a Lunar New Year tasting recently at Whelen’s Beer and Wine in Potomac, Maryland, organized by Nicolas Materese for his Liquid Storyteller Project podcast. The food was not particularly challenging from a wine standpoint, but the wines offered some surprises. Durin Pigato 2023 from Liguria was a delicious white to pair with shrimp dumplings and even a baked charsiu pork bun, while a Domaine Berthet-Rayne Cotes du Rhone red nicely picked up the spice on Sichuan green beans.

In my Washington Post column and on previous iterations of WineLine, I’ve recommended sherry with a celebratory Chinese meal.

Sherry, which hails from the Jerez region of southern Spain, might not be an obvious choice, but there are several reasons to consider it. Chinese cuisine is remarkably varied, from the numbing heat of Sichuan to delicate Cantonese seafood dishes and smoked or roasted meats. Sherry, too, covers a wide range of flavors and styles, from light, delicate fino and manzanilla to fuller, robust oloroso and unctuously sweet dessert wines. Sherry’s relatively high alchol (it is fortified to anywhere between 15 and 20 percent) helps it match the sometimes complex fermented flavors of soy and black beans used in Chinese dishes. And its nutty, oxidized flavors resemble those of Chinese Shaoxing rice wine, a flavor bond that spans continents and cultures.

So if you’re planning a New Year’s dinner, consider a manzanilla sherry with the xiao cai (little dishes, aka appetizers) and lighter seafoods, and keep an amontillado or oloroso on standby for the more robust dishes. A Pedro Ximenez would be great with dessert.

Kung Hei Fat Choy, everyone! Felicitations and prosperity to all in the Year of the Snake.

Jane Cam (Janet Cam Consulting) Hosts Brigitta and Karl Steininger (Weingut Steininger in Langenlois, Kamptal, Austria) at her Home in Maryland 

Austria 2023 by ombiasy WineTours took place from Sunday, May 28 - Thursday, June 08, 2023. We toured Austria for 12 days, starting and ending in Vienna: Wien, Wagram, Carnuntum, Burgenland, Steiermark, Wachau, Kamptal, Kremstal, Traisental, Wien.