Fulget with Sweet and sour pork
Fulget
Winery Maior de Mendoza
www.maiordemendoza.com
D.O.: Rías Baixas
Grapes: 100% Albariño
Ageing: No
Price: 9€
Excerpt from the book “Pairings of spanish wines with exotic cuisines”.
Click to see the preparation of these dishes, in Asian recipes.
Pueden ver la versión española pinchando en Fulget
Maior de Mendoza is a very particular winery in that big world that the Denomination of Origin Rías Baixas has become.
They only elaborate top level albariños and do not compete in price, assuming that their policy is to make the best possible wine with the best possible quality that can be extracted from the grapes in each hawthorn.
If you visit the winery website you will see how carefully the care of the vineyard, the harvesting and the winemaking are carried out (I would need the whole page to describe them).
The result of all this work is a very fresh, fruity wine, with the features of this variety so present and notes of white flowers, even some balsamic memory characteristic of the Salnés Valley (the big eucalyptus plantations in this area are said to be responsible for that peculiar hint).
Sweet and sour pork
This dish can be found in the menus of all Chinese restaurants around the world, but its origins are not in that monstrosity so-called “Chinese-American cuisine”, but it is a famous ancient dish from the Han court in Jiangsu, in the Canton region, from where it spread to all China, producing a thousand variations. For example, in Taiwan it is called “Gulao Rou” (“ancient pork”) because the recipe is considered to have come from Canton centuries ago.
Nowadays, industrial sweet-and-sour sauce is made of glutamate and sugar, real rubbish, but a well-made sauce, with caramel, orange and ginger, is delicious.
As indicated in the recipe, the vegetables must be left almost raw to contrast with the meat and the sauce.
Pairing
This is a good example of how difficult it can be to pair a Chinese dish, because it is itself a mosaic of very different flavours: battered pork meat, sweet-and-sour sauce and almost raw vegetables with their load of vegetable flavours.
Among this complexity of flavours, the dominant factor is the warmth of the dish. Although the vegetables refresh every bite, the sauce enfolds everything and our mouth gets cloyed, asking for a very refreshing wine. This is one of the most remarkable features of this Fulget: its freshness, its aromatic load but also its acidity structure, which will dissolve the sugars of the dish with a sip and leave our mouth clean but with a thousand aromas that will invite us to keep playing with this Galician-Cantonese combination.