Editor’s Note: After reading the title of this post, you may be pondering why Catavino has an article on North-East Chinese cuisine, which is a very good question. Edward Ragg, our Chinese correspondent, has been sharing his experiences living in Beijing as a wine consultant, which have included very detailed and descriptive articles on the state of Spanish wine in east Asia, as well as his experience with pairing traditional Chinese foods with Iberian wine. Considering that Edward is magically finding time to share his knowledge with us, between wine fairs and teaching WSET courses, we are clearly very appreciative. And if you have any questions for Edward, please don’t hesistate to put them in the comments.

It’s now almost two years since my wife, Fongyee, and I moved to China to begin work as wine consultants, a profession that barely exists in a country that only really began importing wine some fifteen years ago and whose own wine industry is dominated by massive government corporations.

Much of that time has, of course, been devoted to setting up a company – no easy thing in the PRC – getting to know the wine importers and fledgling wine magazines as well as becoming more and more familiar with the different national wine markets – Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and further a field – the extent of wine knowledge at consumer and trade levels, people’s expectations of wine in general and what myths v. facts abide in an emergent wine culture.

Trying myriad Chinese wines, judging at Chinese wine competitions and the teething pains of setting up a website and blog – ever works in progress – have had their own challenges. But we can hardly complain: this invaluable …

Not a great deal has been written on what is admittedly the relatively new area of pairing international wines with Chinese cuisine. Or should that be Chinese cuisines? This vast country, now in the grips of the Olympics at last, boasts an incredible array of provincial and regional dishes, embracing just about every cooking technique under the sun – many of which, of course, were either ‘invented’ or developed in China itself.

So, if you want to explore Chinese cooking and try your hand at matching your favorite wines with different dishes, how can you get started? And what dishes might partner well with Iberian wines, an equally diverse world of flavors and textures?

China’s rich culinary heritage is hugely complex. But, put simply, four overall groups dominate: Lu (Shandong), Yue (Cantonese), Chuan (Sichuan) and Huaiyang (Jiangsu). What wines match with these groups? Given the innate diversity of these cuisines, Chinese gourmets will find this question bizarre: a bit like saying, ‘What wines can pair with French, Spanish, Norwegian or Austrian food’? The answers can seem endless, but we have to start somewhere.

Below are some specific examples from each school of cooking matched with one or more Spanish or Portuguese wines. There are certainly enough wine-styles and types of wine-making in the Iberian Peninsula to offer some great matches with Chinese dishes from different traditions.

And, if some of these cuisines are not all that available outside China, the great Cantonese Diaspora has at least meant that what passes for Chinese …