According to a survey released last week customers at Hong Kong's top 65 restaurants can choose from an average of 270 wines, more than half of them French. Some 40 per cent of those wines will be from Burgundy and Bordeaux while five of the top 10 producers are from Champagne.
The survey, by digital wine list developer Entaste also reveals that Hong Kong restaurateurs don't like sweet wines - only 60 per cent carried any at all and of those that were carried more than half are priced at HK$4,000 or more and a quarter at HK$16,000 or more.
It seems that the restaurateurs are more conservative than their customers when matching food and wine.
Master of wine Debra Meiburg says, 'We've noticed a gradual shunning of traditional Western ideas about pairing and increasing experimentation. Pairing wine with Asian cuisines is still a very young field, but its proponents are starting to feel confident enough in their own palates to move beyond the tenets of Western pairing and the commercially motivated suggestions of winemakers to discover for themselves which combinations amplify the dining experience and which are to be avoided.'
The new-found adventurousness is a far cry from when Hongkongers first started drinking wine in numbers, in the 1990s.
One of the influences of British rule in Hong Kong was the wine pairing philosophy of the time. A rudimentary approach of white wine with fish or chicken, red with beef, and a sickly sweet wine with dessert, which expats applied to the local cuisine despite it often being an inappropriate match. Hong Kong Chinese did not begin to drink wine until the '70s and then it was only a handful of overseas-educated Chinese. The favoured Western tipple, from the '60s through to early '90s, to pair with Cantonese food by the locals was cognac, and of course beer, with the former only drunk on special occasions or when wanting to impress. As a result, there was little change in habits until recently.
'The cliche of drinking cognac with Cantonese food is true, especially at Chinese wedding banquets, with a bottle of XO placed on each table, but that has changed a hell of a lot in the last 20 years,' says Simon Tam, Christie's head of wine, China. The change began in the early '90s when more Hong Kong Chinese began to drink red wine for its health benefits, coupled with more wine exposure (through travel, work or expat friends). It came to be seen as a status symbol to rival cognac, with a preference for high-end reds from Bordeaux.