KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 20 — As a country, Malaysia is what you would call a “dry culture”. 

It has nothing to do with rainfall or water supply, but everything to do with alcohol. 

In a wet culture, drinking is routine, woven into daily meals — a pint at a pub lunch in the UK, a glass of wine with dinner in France. 

In a dry one, it gets pushed to the edges: weekend parties, big celebrations, the after-work beer, the occasional brandy binge at a wedding.

Wine has come a long way here since the days of Jacob’s Creek and Wolf Blass. Restaurants now carry proper wine lists, some with dedicated sommeliers, and there are even specialty wine bars — a few push some truly tawdry natural wine, however. 

But outside that, and beyond avid wine geek circles, pairing wine with Malaysian food remains largely unexplored.

A fair number of guides exist online — some local, some from countries with Malaysian diaspora — recommending wines to pair with Malaysian food. 

Our flavours are usually presented as the biggest obstacle to pairing: words like bold, vibrant and complex get thrown around, but in the end, they somehow always land on a perfect wine for each dish. 

Some variations of nasi lemak, beef rendang or laksa gets paired with a Riesling, Syrah or Chardonnay, but none address the real challenge of pairing wine with food in Malaysia: practicality.

Establishments serving nasi lemak, beef rendang or laksa typically aren’t BYO — Malaysia isn’t a dry culture by accident — and the alternative is tapau-ing said dishes home and cracking open a bottle at 10 in the morning. Not ideal. 

Where you’re far more likely to encounter wine alongside these hawker classics is a house party, a potluck, some kind of catered spread. 

In those settings, versatility is king. 

Rather than a wine for each dish, you need a wine for almost every dish.

If I had to name one safest all-round pick, it’s non-vintage brut rosé Champagne. 

Seriously undervalued in Malaysia, it’s tailor-made for our climate: refreshing enough for the heat, substantial enough to drink with food, and remarkably compatible with the flavours we eat. 

Day or night, there’s a strong case that we should all be drinking more of it.

High acidity and fine bubbles cut through richness and fried food, while its light red-fruit character works naturally with spice, sambal, sweet sauces and smoky flavours. 

Char kuey teow is the dream match: acidity and bubbles cut through the grease of the noodles, while the wine’s fruit complements the dish’s caramelised, savoury flavours and smoky wok hei. 

The same principle applies to ayam goreng berempah, nasi lemak and satay — acidity and bubbles against the richness and fat, fruit balancing the sweet, spicy and smoky notes in each.

Outside of house parties, bars and restaurants serving alcohol alongside local food have been around for a while — older pubs have done it for years, usually over a beer. 

The Vintry Group of wine bars and restaurants has spent two decades introducing Malaysians to pairing wine with local food, helmed throughout by Master of Wine (MW) Candidate Wong Yin-How. 

His curated collection spans rare vintages to unique varietals, all meant to be enjoyed alongside favourites like fried Hokkien mee and roast pork.

He likes to pair a Barolo, made from Nebbiolo grapes and often known as “the king of Italian wines,” with the classic fried noodle dish — one that shows, in his words, “purity of red and dark plums and liquorice and acidic thrust, to cut through the soy and wok-singed richness of this noodle dish.” 

Roast pork gets paired with Champagne — specifically a Chardonnay-reliant cuvée. 

“The crisp, piercing acidity of a cool climate expression of this grape, plus chalky autolytic notes, allows it to balance the rich umami in the salty pork,” he says.

He has answers for some less obvious dishes too: an off-dry Riesling for luncheon meat fries — a classic Malaysian pub snack — its piercing acidity and tropical fruit playing counterpoint to the salted meat; and a cool-climate Malbec for clay pot loh shi fun, dark-fruited and high-toned enough to match the dish’s sweet, salty edge.

Not everyone has Vintry’s cellar to draw from, though, which raises the more useful question of how to choose and serve wine with Malaysian food without one. 

For Reuben Suresh Arthur, senior lecturer at Taylor’s Culinary Institute and a WSET UK-certified wine trainer, budget is the first wall most people hit.

Taxes, import costs and regulations have made wine “a middle, or more likely upper-middle-class beverage” here — the cheapest bottle at a local supermarket runs about RM50, before restaurant markups and corkage fees that can climb to RM50 to RM100 a bottle push it further still. 

His advice is to stop chasing prestige. 

Rather than reaching for something with a brand name, he points people towards “simple, fruit-driven, low-tannin, off-dry” bottles — wines he says often pair better with Malaysian food’s higher sugar content than anything more “prestigious” would. 

“Wine, at its core, is simply fermented grape juice,” he says. 

“But in many Asian countries, we’ve elevated it into something to show off, to establish status in a social group. So bringing a simple wine to dinner may be considered unacceptable — even if the pairing is perfect.”

In his view, the tendency to treat wine as a symbol before a beverage is exactly what the industry needs to unlearn. 

“Education, education, education,” he says, is what it’ll take to prepare the next generation of wine professionals. 

Sommeliers can be snobbish, he adds, often fixating on “prestigious” wines that don’t always work with local cuisine. 

He’d rather see more exposure to supermarket bottles, fortified wines and indigenous local drinks built into training, and importers doing more pairings with local food instead of defaulting to the usual script. 

“Almost all the wine dinners I’ve attended,” he says, “have paired their wines with Western cuisine.” 

The answer, then, isn’t to make Malaysian food more “wine-friendly”. It’s to find wines that fit the way we actually eat and drink, which means accepting that the right wines for Malaysian food might not be the most prestigious bottles in the cellar, but are the best wine for the dishes. 

Deciding that is something Malaysians are far better placed to do than anyone writing about us from anywhere else.

* Follow Ethan Lau on Instagram @eatenlau for more unfiltered takes on food and wine.