What wines pair best with Filipino food?

MANILA, Philippines - Imagine some of your favorite Filipino dishes — such as pork adobo, binakol, grilled chicken, and arroz a la cubana— cooked with some of the most famous Chilean wines.

At the Casillero del Diablo event, which was held recently at the Pan-Pacific Hotel in Manila, celebrity chef Sharwin Tee not only paired the wines with his dishes, but also used the wines in cooking the dishes.

“I wanted to pair off each of the wines with something that I felt would enhance not only the flavor of the dish but also enhance the flavor of the wine,” he said. “I find that if you cook with the wine and drink with it, it marries well because the flavors are all there. Every wine that I drank would remind me of what dish it would go well with, and so that’s how my recipes came about.” 

Chef Sharwin chose Casillero del Diablo, “the most widely recognized premium brand of Chilean wine.” 

“Casillero del Diablo is made by Concha y Toro, the biggest winemaker in Chile,” says Ramon Daez, general manager of Fly Ace Corporation, one of the country’s leading food and beverage consumer goods companies. “This is not our first venture into wine. We also carry Italian wine, Don Lucio, and Spanish wine, Doña Elena. We are also the exclusive distributor of Franzia, the popular table wine that comes in a box.”

“Because of the range that Concha y Toro carries, from entry-level wines all the way to the icons, the high-level wines, there are so many options,” Daez says.  “Regardless of where your level is, whether you’re a beginner exploring new things or an expert wine enthusiast, there are just so many that you can choose from. What we have at Casillero del Diablo are the varietals: merlot, chardonnay, shiraz tinto, pinot noir and sauvignon blanc, as well as Chile’s famous Carmenere, and the bestseller, cabernet sauvignon.”

Filipino dishes are not commonly paired with wines. “Normally, you’d think wine would be best paired with French cuisine, with very Western type of food,” Daez says. “But we’d like Filipinos to understand that wine can be paired with anything that you like. So we asked chef Sharwin to develop some Filipino dishes that would be perfectly paired with our wines.

“Chilean wines have a different character from some of the other New World wines such as the Australian wines, for example, that are a bit lighter,” Daez continues. “You will find that Chilean wines have a little bit more body, and therefore pairs perfectly with our kind of food, which is kind of heavy, with certain distinct and strong flavors such as salt, vinegar, pepper, garlic and ginger. Lighter wines would be overwhelmed.”

The first dish chef Sharwin presented was Pulled Pork Adobo Nachos, paired with Casillero del Diablo Merlot. This red variety from Chile’s central valley is “soft, rich, and easy to drink,” says Pablo Pressac, Concha y Toro brand ambassador and sommelier. “It is perfect for long-cooking meats.”

“The merlot has a nice fruity flavor to go with the adobo,” chef Sharwin adds. “When cooking with wine, use wine you will drink, because when you cook wine, you are concentrating its flavor. So if the wine does not taste great, you are actually concentrating a bad taste.”

The second dish was Spicy Mussel and Clam Binakol, which was paired with Casillero del Diablo Chardonnay. “This comes from the coastal area of Chile, where it gets the cool breezes from the ocean, so you get the soft, sharp saltiness and freshness,” said Pressac, who enjoyed the binakol. “It’s very familiar,” he said. “It’s a dish we see in our homes.”

Chef Sharwin’s personal favorite is the Casillero del Diablo Carmenere. It’s a medium-bodied red wine that originated in Bordeaux and now grows almost only in Chile, where it survived the black plague that decimated the variety in Europe in the late 1800s.

“I had no idea what it was about,” chef Sharwin relates. “I tasted it and really liked that it was very light and sweet. I thought it would go great with either a dessert or a glaze.”

And that was how chef Sharwin came up with his Grilled Chicken with Guava Glaze dish, “Filipino barbeque being one of my favorites,” he shared.

Chef Sharwin’s Pulled Pork Adobo Nachos paired with Casillero del Diablo Merlot

The final course was the heaviest, Arroz a la Cubana “Omu-style.” “It’s a very comforting dish,” Sharwin said. “It’s a great example of a good contrast of flavors, with the rice and the ground beef and the saba bananas.”

This was perfectly paired with Casillero del Diablo’s bestseller, Cabernet Sauvignon. “Half of the production of Casillero del Diablo is Cabernet Sauvignon,” Pressac says. “It is the first wine that they made. It comes from the foothills of the Andes, the traditional wine-producing area of Chile. It is the most popular in the world and is number one in the UK. You can’t achieve that without consistency and quality.”

“Casillero del Diablo is one of our midstream brands,” Daez says. “They are not too much of an entry-level wine; neither are they too expensive. At about P450 per bottle, pricewise, it’s very reasonable. Wine need not be intimidating. I think Filipinos are ready to take wine with their meals.”

Chef Sharwin agrees that wine is something that you should enjoy. “You should drink it and pair it with food the way you like it, as long as the wine and the food taste better with each other,” he says. “We should not be intimidated. We should be concerned more about how we feel. I think it’s mostly about the enjoyment.”