We’re lightening up this Monday’s issue to talk about something we’ve yet to cover: unexpected explorations and celebrations in Filipino food and culture. The first issues leaned heavily on research and aimed to interrogate axioms as well as challenge our own personal biases. While we enjoy digging through academic journals and historical sources (truly, no sarcasm there), we also want to make an effort to send dispatches from our own community. In part one of this two-part issue, we explore wine. Part two will cover craft beer and cocktails. If you enjoyed this post, subscribe if you haven’t already and feel free to share wherever your heart desires (preferably via a mass group text or maybe on a billboard but social media works for us, too).
A few years ago, I brought my pops to LASA (now Lasita), a Filipino restaurant in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles’ Chinatown. Back then, we were encouraged to bring our own beverages to enjoy with our meal. We had a few wine bottles in the house, so I thought, why not? My pops sipped on his glass of red wine as we munched on adobo peanuts, crispy duck arroz caldo, and beef kilawin. Midway through dinner, I noticed him scanning the room, looking a bit uneasy.
“Is the food okay?” I asked.
“It’s good. It’s just I never thought I would be drinking wine with Filipino food. Look, so is almost everyone here,” he replied.
That was in 2016. I still wonder if his words leaned more towards an exposed shame of his own preconceptions or genuine shock that wine could be found adjacent to Filipino food on the table. We’re long past the mentality that wine is highbrow, Filipino food is not. Why then, isn’t Filipino food more talked about within the context of beverages outside of the de facto pairing of Red Horse beer or rum? Okay, besides the fact that the Philippines is a heavy beer and rum drinking culture.
Have we boxed ourselves with our own biases on what Filipino cuisine should encompass? Or is that we’ve become content with the traditional pairing rubric found within the different beverages themselves? Is it because our food is considered too foreign to fit within the flavor palate of a Riesling or a saison? It could also be simply that nontraditional beverages are difficult to pair with the stronger flavor components found in Filipino food: soy sauce, garlic, sourness. Whatever the reason, more and more individuals are looking to challenge these perceived limitations within our cuisine.
This dialogue isn’t meant to imply that Filipino food will only become better if we start pairing outside of San Miguel beer. What I want to emphasize is that when we embrace our multitude, we can find ourselves in a broader world of flavor combinations and explorations.
What exactly do I mean by embracing our multitude?
Let me rewind a bit. I grew up on the border of Carson and Torrance in Southern California. Carson is one of the most Filipino dense cities in the state. Torrance, the neighboring city, is home to the largest Japanese population in the US outside of Honolulu. My grandpa drank hot sake more than he did Philippine beers. My comfort food was shio ramen from the local Japanese market food court as much as kare kare from Tita Celia’s, the corner turo turo down our street. I would find as much joy seeing a bag of fresh pandesal for breakfast as I did seeing a bag of Jack in the Box spicy chicken sandwiches buried in excessive ranch packets when my dad would come home late from work.
You might be wondering, why does this matter? I didn’t subscribe to this newsletter to read a fragmented autobiography! Don’t worry, sporadic recollections of my life accounts conclude here.
I think celebrating ourselves and our food is to break away from thinking we can only exist in the space of either/or. We can celebrate our roots as much as our influences brought by our communities and our upbringing in the pockets we’ve grown to call home. I’m Filipino. I’m American. I also gravitate to Japanese flavors because I grew up eating Japanese food. I enjoy San Miguel beer. I enjoy oolong tea. I also very much enjoy sake (so much so, I took a course at the Sake School of America and earned my Sake Adviser certification but that can be for another newsletter).
We contain multitudes; when we free ourselves from thinking we can either only be this or that, we shed the cloak of oversimplification and build an intricacy not only in ourselves, but also in how we can approach other facets in our lives. By celebrating our individual uniqueness and all the messiness that comes with it, we can create more opportunities for conversation within our culture and cuisine.
How can the scope of our conversations widen by this active reimagining? In this two-part issue, we highlight individuals in the beverage industry flexing their infinitely complicated humanness to explore just that.
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself;
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)” — Walt Whitman
Miguel de Leon on shifting paradigms and using wine as markers for question making.
Miguel serves as the wine director for SoHo’s Pinch Chinese. He also sits at the resource council for the Hue Society, an organization that promotes and prioritizes BIPOC professionals in the wine industry, creating curriculum that focuses on decolonizing and recentering wine spaces and language. He edits and contributes to Disgorgeous, a podcast and zine about wine. He advises the UC Davis Viticulture and Enology Program for its seminar work in the field of Critical Wine Studies.
In 2021, Miguel was named one of the 75 People Working to Build a Better Drinks World by Imbibe Magazine, and was named the inaugural recipient of the Michelin Guide Sommelier Award in New York City for his work with natural wine and hospitality advocacy.
Q: You mentioned, “I can’t wait to see the best sommelier in America be someone who looks like me, someone who can get inspired by a somm whose values resonate with their own”. What values do you feel are lacking in the wine industry and want to see more of?
Filipinos are known for hospitality, but there's surprisingly few of us who are vocal or public about being in restaurants because there's this funny notion that it's not a real profession. That's something that I want to change. If I can make it easier for some other Filipino out there to look at this sphere, to consider that it's something that they can claim as their own — that's a huge part of it.
It could also shift, culturally, the needle in terms of looking at restaurants not as a fallback position, not as a thing that you just dabble in. It's something that you can push conversations forward with, something that you can be proud of.
Q: Why do you think Filipino food is rarely talked about within the context of beverages outside of beer or rum?
Food is such a gatekeeping thing for our community. If you don't know how to make adobo, if you don't know how to make a pot of rice — that's kind of a thing that we make fun of each other for. I mean, to an extent it's kind of true, but at the same time it's the thing that hinders people from celebrating it fully.
There’s a reason why we don't talk about Filipino beverages, even though we know there's plenty. It's because we don't know what they are or we've just lost them forever because the information just isn't there. You have to really, like you said, you really do have to kind of dig deep in terms of contextualizing these things just a little bit better for everyone else, because if you don't, how else can it survive? It's really having this question about pushing it for the culture, rather than for yourself. It's de-centering yourself so that the thing can survive better than you.
National, even regional cuisines have their own libraries of things. But when it comes to us, I can't find [Doreen Fernandez’s] book, Tikim. it just got reprinted by a Dutch press and now it's a hundred dollars in a bookstore. There's no access. There’s no information that's out there that's readily available for us. And so we have to be the ones who are continuing to write and rewrite these things.
Q: Can Filipino food pair with wine?
The first thing that we have to ask is, “Why don't we see it?” First, like I mentioned, there's a cultural gatekeeping that we talk about with wine that it becomes too white or that it becomes outside of the realm of our own expertise. I'm a Filipino sommelier. Where’s my expertise? Give me that.
Second, when we talk about Filipino food and wine... I don't think, “Can Filipino food pair with wine?” is a good question because it weasels us out as a thing. I think what we have to really drill down on is where can we find the best ways to kind of maximize the hedonism of both of those things. Somebody out there is probably doing the work right now. It's different when somebody understands the vegetables in bahay kubo and tries to find those things in wine themselves. To me, that's really pleasurable. If you look at, if you even just listen to that kid's song — those are flavor notes that they're spouting off. Well, all those things that exist in wine also, I think, are really great matches for a lot of our cuisine.
Q: Great point. Let’s rephrase that question. How can the flavor profiles or notes that exist within Filipino food pair with wine?
Let's talk about some just general notes in Filipino food. The fermented flavor is a really big deal. For me, natural wine is a really magical pairing with that because fermentation is part of the flavoring process. It informs a lot of how the fruit tastes. How much lower the alcohol is — which actually makes it a little bit better for food and how it spikes acid.
The second thing is sourness, but we don't talk about it a lot. Sourness and Filipino food is one of the hallmarks of the cuisine. And we talk about acidity in wine a lot, but we don't consider those two things the same. But high acid food loves high acid wine.
Another thing to consider is that Filipino food also really likes to have a smattering of sweetness everywhere. Sweetness increases flavors like bitterness and sourness and wine. And so we have to be really careful about the mindfulness of those things. So in a very technical food science way, there's a lot of things that we can do with wine, especially because wine is fermented, especially because there's a lot of ferments in Filipino food, especially because it's higher in texture.
We have to talk in really big general strokes here because there's no immediate thing to the terroir of the Philippines outside of our fermented goods. It's hard to put analogs in but I have some specific examples in my head that I think would be pretty good with that stuff.
Q: How does wine fit into the larger ecology of things?
A lot of the time, wine is the accessory, right? It’s the excuse to hang out with somebody. It’s the excuse that we give to each other, so that very different parts of our lives can come together. I take a lot of solace in that. I work and live in an industry that pays special attention to those very deep connections.
I just get to use those very same things that I serve as markers for question making when I live in this space, because I'm surrounded by it so much. If this can provide you so much joy, how can it provide more people joy without it devaluing? We can have better wine. Maybe it doesn't taste different, but how it got to you all the way to where that glass came from — the wine is ultimately better because of the decisions that people made to get there. I like using that a lot.
So that's part number one that I'm trying to shift people's attentions to is that vintage doesn't matter, typicity doesn't matter. This idea of how we take care of the earth as a system informs all of those things. And that's why it's a big question for me to have to answer now. Generationally speaking, we're at a liminal point also where things are in really deep transition.
People are dying. People are taking over wineries. Vineyards need to get swapped out for something. There's market pressure. There's climate pressure. We’re at a really interesting flashpoint with wine. So those are things that I want to shed a little bit more light on.
Josh Decolongon on navigating language and creating a more inclusive wine space (that includes memes).
Originally having studied science and cognitive systems in Canada, Josh turned to the world of wine and spirits for its multidisciplinary nature: the fields of gastronomy, science, history, and culture led Josh to a lifelong interest in the human experience through different lenses. After being one of the youngest in the country to become a Certified Sommelier and achieve the WSET Diploma, he went on to cofound a VC-funded start-up that crafts alcoholic beverages in a lab.
Q: How did wine play a role in your exploration of Filipino cuisine and culture?
I've always been interested in exploring [my Filipino identity], but I never knew where to begin because obviously the Philippines is thousands of islands. I didn't know exactly where to start and for such a large country, there's so few standard resources. I think during 2020, I bought so many Filipino history books that all said slightly different things, depending on who the author was.
Years ago, I realized that I could name more French wine regions than I could Filipino regions. And I'm like, that doesn't seem right to me. I need to know where I come from and not only where I come from, but it's important because being a child of immigrants who lives in the diaspora, it's important to know these things because they have shaped you and how you interact with the world around you.
That was the starting point. Then I wanted to know what different adobos are made where, and for what reasons, and look at that in the context of wine and flavor and what pairs with them. That for me, was when it sort of clicked.
Q: How does explorations in your Filipino identity and Filipino food translate to how you navigate yourself in wine?
Wine is like a window into different cultures. I think it's really interesting to look at wine and also challenge the culture around it because with things like wine, there is, I guess, a certain luxury that comes with it. You have so many wines with ultra specific pairings, right? It’s like, oh, this Bordeaux goes with a pepper-crusted steak with rosemary that was grown for however long.
But it's like, oh, this Riesling pairs with Asian food. It's a very blanket statement. Very dismissive in a sense. Asian food and Filipino food… there are so many nuances, as many nuances as there are with Eurocentric pairings. Asian food is as deserving of attention as all these other Eurocentric parents.
I want to be able to marry Filipino food and the exploration of this culture with something like wine, which, if wine is truly for everybody and for everybody to enjoy — should also include different kinds of foods and different kinds of people.
Q: The role of language seems to come back frequently in both your personal and professional journeys. How do you approach the very Eurocentric language of wine?
One of the things that we love to talk about as people who are, basically not straight white cis men, is how we're able to communicate about wine. I love being able to use different experiences to describe wines or being able to use different flavors that we experienced as kids. I love being able to describe kalamansi notes. Tamarind. Soy sauce even. And some smoky wines reminded me of when my grandma was frying fish and having that very vague, briny smokiness, and being able to use that language.
In a lot of wine education, it's very much like you're only allowed to say this and this. But by kind of enforcing that, you have to ask yourself, who is the audience? By opening up how we're able to speak about wine and what we're allowed to say and how to act, we’re both indirectly and directly communicating that wine is for everybody.
It's impossible to say that wine is for everybody without including everybody in the tasting notes and without being able to see yourself in the way that we're able to communicate about wine. That’s what I'm trying to do with my writing, my videos, my memes.
And, um, that's another thing that I want to bring into the world of wine — is to be able to do things like comparing grapes to different astrological signs or different pop divas or what have you. Because it's so funny to me that people see that as something that is too silly for the world of wine. Wine is meant to be fun and it's meant to connect people to each other. So if that does the job, then why don't we do more of that? It was just great to see that people were more encouraged to expand the space.
Q: In your blog, you explore Filipino food and wine pairings. Can you walk us through how you approached the pairings?
I took sort of a condensed list of flavors that were unique and prevalent in Filipino cuisine. And again, it's very hard to do this when it's obviously thousands of islands and you have different variations here and there, but I wanted sort of a snapshot of different Filipino flavors.
I thought to myself, okay, so what can I come up with? Okay, so there's adobo. So I had a soy sauce and vinegar mix. Then I had kalamansi. Then longganisa, which was an interesting one because I know that so many different cultures around the world have their own sausage, but I think that Philippines is unique in a sense that they often have a sweetness to it. And again, I know different regions in the Philippines have their own longganisa. Also, I had burong mangga (pickled green mango) — just that sweet, sour, tropical moment. And of course, bagoong, fish sauce, and finally, brown garlic.
I know that pairing these flavors by themselves with the wine can often be too general so what I did after this huge experiment and kind of figuring out what went with what… that's actually when I started writing a little bit more about the dishes themselves and pairing them with wines to make sure that they worked in practice.
Sparkling wine, for example, went really well with pancit and lumpia. Piaparon manok went really well with Gewürztraminer. Sherry is a fortified wine that's made in Spain. Biologically aged sherry is one where it's sort of aged underneath a layer of yeast and it gives it this kind of a nuttiness and a little bit of this yeastiness to it.I found that that paired really well with the bagoong because it gave space for both of the flavors to exist without competing with each other. In that particular experiment, I made pinakbet and I paired it with a Manzanilla sherry.
In part two:
🍺 Joel Darwin and Marla Darwin on community and unconventional ways to preserve cultural traditions.
🍹 Marlo Gamora on expanding palettes and imagining the future for rum.
Special salamat to:
In Case You Missed It
Finding Home through Kare Kare
Current meryenda
“It’s Time to Decolonize Wine” by Miguel de Leon | PUNCH
“Why Sinigang?” by Doreen G. Fernandez | Center for Art + Thought
“Can We Make Community Pantries Sustainable?” | GRID Magazine
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