The Social Drinker

What to drink with a takeaway

Ionce edited a newspaper which had a column called My Weekend, where a local worthy would describe a typical weekend. As the weeks rolled by, it became evident there is no typical Saturday or Sunday, but there is a typical Friday evening, and this usually involved a Chinese takeaway, a bottle of wine and a DVD.

DVDs have gone, but I assume a Chinese takeaway and a bottle of wine still herald the beginning of many weekends. So what to drink for this most sociable of meals? At one level, the question is absurd. Nobody asks what drinks match European food, but in the real world, after a tiring week, one simply wants something that will neither overwhelm spicy food or be completely overwhelmed by it.

Conventional wisdom recommends a rose, or an aromatic white such as a riesling or pinot gris from Alsace, and all three wines are an excellent safe bet.

Another option, however, is to ignore wine completely and go for a drink that tastes of ginger one of the basic ingredients in so many Chinese dishes, and one of the great, but often ignored, flavours in drinks.

I’ve already recommended the brilliant Plum & Ginger Cider from Northern Irelandbased MacIvors as a refreshing drink on ice, but it is also an ideal partner for duck pancakes and the like.

Another suitable ginger drink is ginger beer, which is one of those strange English drinks that should not work, but does. My favourite is Crabbie’s Original Alcoholic Ginger Beer from O’Brien’s and other stockists, but you can always try something like Bundaberg Ginger Beer or Old Jamaican instead.

A final option that will take a little bit of planning is plum wine. Very few offlicences sell the stuff, but many of the Asian stores that have popped up across the country do sell plum wine, and it makes an unusual partner to duck and black bean sauce.