What Wine Goes With Dim Sum?

Sparkling wine — Champagne, Cava, Crémant or Prosecco. The one wine that suits steamed, fried, sweet and savoury at the same sitting.

Dim sum defeats the usual approach because there is no single dish to pair with. A steamed prawn dumpling, a fried taro puff, a sticky char siu bun and a custard tart may all be on the table at once, and any wine chosen for one of them will be wrong for the next. What you need is a wine that is good with everything rather than perfect with anything.

Why bubbles win the whole table

Sparkling wine does three separate jobs here. The carbonation cuts through the fried items — bubbles physically lift oil off the palate. The high acidity refreshes between very different mouthfuls. And a touch of residual sugar, present in most Brut sparkling wine, keeps it from turning sour against anything sweet, which is where dry still whites usually fail at the end of the meal.

It also handles the soy and the salt. Salt makes wine taste softer and fruitier, so a sparkling wine that seems lean on its own fills out beside a soy-dipped dumpling.

Which bottle

Champagne if you are being generous, and a standard Brut rather than a Brut Nature — the small amount of dosage is doing useful work against the sweeter items.

Cava is the sensible everyday choice. Same production method as Champagne, second fermentation in the bottle, minimum nine months on the lees, at a fraction of the price. Its slightly earthy, bready character suits pork and prawn fillings well.

Prosecco is fresher and more floral — fermented in a tank rather than the bottle, so there is less bready complexity. Better with the lighter steamed dishes than the fried ones.

If you want a still wine

An off-dry Riesling is the best still answer, for the same reasons it works across so much of this list: aromatic, high acid, low alcohol, no tannin, and a little sugar for the sweeter buns.

For red, keep it very light and cool — a Beaujolais or a light Pinot Noir. Char siu and spare ribs genuinely suit a fruity red, but tannin is the enemy of the delicate steamed dishes sharing the table, so choose for the whole meal rather than the best bite of it.

And as with ramen, the traditional answer beats all of them: tea. Pu-erh with something rich, jasmine with something delicate. It is what dim sum was designed around — yum cha means “drink tea”.