This Sunday’s Super Bowl will feature a half-time show with Madonna, who may inspire a dance party as she shimmies and shakes her way through Give Me All Your Love, Ray of Light, Vogue, Music and Holiday.

Question is, what wine will you drink for the Super Bowl and Madonna?

While it would be fun to toast Madonna with one of her dad’s wines from Ciccone Vineyards, it might be a little late to get any bottles shipped from the winery on Michigan’s Leelenau Peninsula.

If you go for typical football foods – pizza, nachos, salsa, potato chips, dips, cheese, chicken wings, barbecue ribs – that’s a lot of oily, spicy, acidic, high protein food to pair with wine. Here are a few suggestions:

White Wine

Die-hard Giant or Patriots fans should definitely spring for real French Champagne, which always tastes sweeter when your team wins the Super Bowl. For the rest of us a clean, locally-made Brut is a sure bet for potato chips or popcorn.

Crisp, dry rieslings or sauvignon blancs are great white wines for cutting through cholesterol and heat, and for refreshing the palate.

Red Wine

For a red wine that’s light as the feet you’re watching, a fruity, racy Chilean pinot noir will push down morsels without leaving cleat marks on your tongue.

For beefier team players, a fruity zinfandel, a meaty syrah or petite sirah – or a California red wine blend – will handily tackle the spice of wings, pork and sausage. But look for something under 14.5 % alcohol since heat + spice = palate overkill.

Men who want to feel more manly, and perhaps grow a few more chest hairs, should try strongly tannic red wines like a French Cahors (malbec) or a Uruguayan Tannat. You can wear your purple teeth like a badge of honor.

Since the 49ers didn’t make it, I have no team preference in this Super Bowl. However, I will be rooting for Madonna to not get all Hung Up on her lip-syncing.

Happy Super Bowl Sunday!

No wine on this table. Photo by Jed Kirschbaum, Baltimore Sun

I meant to write a Chinese food-and-wine pairing post, to celebrate Chinese New Year, until I remembered that most Chinese people don’t drink wine. Or any alcohol. They can’t drink because of a defective gene, ALDH2, that prevents them from processing alcohol.

The reaction is termed Oriental Flushing Syndrome and is most common in southeastern China. My Chinese co-worker at my fun job says she gets rashes all over her body and the smallest glass makes her dizzy and knocks her out. I asked about a half dozen Chinese folks what wine they had with dinner on Chinese New Year’s eve. Only one woman admitted to drinking alcohol.

This Flushing Syndrome is really a shame since the Chinese are such famous foodies. When you see what they eat on Chinese New Year Eve and for fifteen days after, it’s like a wine-pairing challenge supreme. If it were me sitting at that table I would have a glass of white wine, a glass of red wine, and a flute of bubbly.

Instead, Chinese more often drink tea with dinner. Or if they do drink alcohol, they also consume, as Benjamin Tseng writes in How You Might Cure Asian Glow, a “comically large amount of water.”

So, if the Chinese are genetically predisposed to this type of alcohol poisoning, why is the wine industry touting China as the next big thing in wine markets?

Sure, there are 1.3 billion people in China, but how many hundreds of millions of them are unable to stomach wine?  And, why don’t the Chinese wine market cheerleaders mention this flushing conundrum in their propaganda?

In The Wine Market in China: Opportunities for Canadian Wine Exporters, Agriculture Canada blithely states that “Alcoholic beverages accompany meals and are frequently served during business functions.”

Really? How many showoffy businessmen are there to buy all the wines Canada wants to export to China? And if my Chinese-Canadians friends don’t even drink wine on New Year’s – the most auspicious day in the Chinese calendar – how can they expect Mainland Chinese to pour wine with everyday meals?

Pathetically little has been written about the issue of marketing wine to a country where up to half the population is made sick by wine.

One article, Chinese Are New Wine Market…Except, by William “Rusty” Gaffney, M.D. of  the Pinot File, posits, “although the potential market for wine sales among China’s newly affluent consumers is large, up to half the population who suffer from the Oriental Flushing Syndrome will be unable or unwilling to drink wine.” So, where’s the wine market?

I’ve raised a lot of questions I can’t answer. If you have an insight to this Chinese wine market paradox, please explain it to me here.

Meanwhile, in this Year of the Dragon, I’d like to wish a hearty Gung Hay Fat Choy to all my Chinese friends.

And to my friends who like to drink wine with Chinese food, let me offer these suggestions:

• Seafood and lightly flavored dishes – sparkling, sauvingon blanc, dry reisling, gruner veltliner, pinot gris, pinot grigio or vinho verde
• Sweet and sour – unoaked chardonnay, fruit-forward rosé
• Spicy Szechuan – off-dry reisling, gewürtztraminer, icewine
• Rich, meaty hotpots – medium to full-bodied, fruity reds like zinfandel, syrah, grenache, mourvedre or pinot noir.

Happy Chinese New Year!

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Here are new lyrics for a song I wrote last year, inspired by John Coltrane, whose interpretation of My Favorite Things gave The Sound of Music  its purpose for existence.

Hit the Play button and sing along with My Favorite Wines!

Sonoma Pinot and young Burgundy,

Syrah from Napa and Côte-Rôtie,

Tannic Bordeaux that makes beef taste so fine,

These are a few of my favorite wines.

Zinfandel blended with Petite Sirah,

Malbec from mountains above Mendoza,

Lively Chiantis to drink while I dine,

These are a few of my favorite wines.

When the money’s short,

when the shipment’s slow,

when the wine goes bye-bye,

I simply remember my favorite wines

and then I don’t feel,

so dry!

Marsanne and Rousanne and Gruner Veltliner,

Riesling and Muscat and Gewurtztraminer,

Delicate Champagne with bubbles so fine,

These are a few of my favorite wines.

Cabernet Franc and Cab Sauvignon,

Barbera, Barolo, Melon de Bourgogne,

Pear-flavored Madeleine Angevine,

These are a few of my favorite wines.

When the money’s short,

when the shipment’s slow,

when the wine goes bye-bye,

I simply remember my favorite wines

and then I don’t feel,

so dry!

Happy Holidays from Tasting Room Confidential and may all your Christmas wines be white!

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