Wines to reach for when it’s noodle night

Until very recently, if you’d asked me what wine goes best with noodles, I’d have said you were making a category error. Why, I’d have argued, reach for a wine when you have a whole set of liquids – tea, sake, beer – already in place in countries where noodles have been part of the culture for much longer than they have in the UK?

What changed? Like pretty much everyone else I know, noodle dishes of all kinds started taking up a lot more places in my household’s weekly meal rotations. And the more noodles I ate, the more I got over the idea that there was something inauthentic about drinking wine with dishes that are essentially East Asian (no matter how Wagamama-ishly inauthentic my own interpretations of these dishes might be).

It’s not as if noodles on their own are in any way a difficult match: whether we’re looking at soba, udon or ramen, and whether they’re rice, wheat or buckwheat-based, there’s nothing problematic, from a wine-matching point of view, about the strands themselves, any more than there is with spaghetti or tagliatelle. Just as with pasta, it’s really the stuff that goes with the noodles that determines what you’re going to drink with them. And if you can get past the ingrained cultural conservatism that lingers in that (often useful) food-and-wine-matching maxim “what grows together, goes together”, wine + noodles = some seriously fabulous combinations that are every bit as effective as classic European matches such as sancerre and goat’s cheese or truffles and barolo.

The variously delicious dishes featured on these pages this week offer several cases in point. For Tony Tan’s char kway teow, I’d be mindful of the chilli and the fatty richness (especially if you’re using what Tony says is the traditional lard as your cooking fat). The spicy heat is easily offset with a bit of (but not too much) sugar, while the sturdy texture needs something with a bit of presence, and the fat a dose of acidity to cut through. All points lead to the rich but fluent wines of Alsace, and especially to the French region’s take on pinot gris (aka pinot grigio), in an off-dry, verging on medium-sweet style such as the lushly quince-fruited Cave de Beblenheim Pinot Gris Réserve 2023 (£12, Waitrose), or a New Zealand wine operating in the same mode such as Lidl’s pear-scented New Zealand Pinot Gris, Gisborne 2025 (£7.99).

Emiko Davies’s winter vegetable and udon noodle hot pot, by contrast, is a deep study in umami for winter’s end, and the very mention of that savoury sense has me thinking, in an almost Pavlovian way, of sherry. The glossy, nutty richness and complexity and subtle green-olive and herbal tone of Sánchez Romate Amontillado Olvidado NV (£16.25, Waitrose) harmonises and weaves in and out of the broth and fat silky noodles seamlessly.

More generally, I’ve learned to take my vinous cue with noodles from the drinks that are more usually served with them. There’s something about the combination of tea-like tannins and refreshing tang you get in orange wine, for example, that has a lot in common with tea: oolong in the case of the gently grippy Californian blend of Italian varieties that is the tropical fruit-juicy Giornata Orangotango 2023 (£25, Ocado). I’m also keen on the textural affinity between silky, fruity, light tannined young pinot noir reds and silky noodles when there’s not too much chilli or other hot spices kicking around. The easy, soft-berried Von Reben Pinot Noir 2024 (£12.99, Laithwaites) from the Pfalz in Germany did the job with my most recent new weeknight staple: a miso-brothy home-made ramen with slices of roast pork.