Matching Chinese food and wine is an excuse to have lots of fun and to experiment. What better laboratory can you find than Macau? We have all the local ingredients and many well-trained chefs making excellent Chinese food.

We also have wines from around the world to pair with that delicious cooking.

Drinking wine and the culture that goes with it has only really started to emerge from its European way of thinking, like a tortoise blinking in the spring light, in the last thirty years. That means that many of the ideas we have about wine and how it goes with food work fantastically for Europe and its many splendid cuisines but need a radical rethink when it comes to letting them loose on Asia.

Chinese cuisine, as our Por-Pors never tire of telling us, is thousands of years old and needs its own approach and respect.

Let’s ditch the obvious misconception that Chinese food only means Cantonese food. Migrants from Hong Kong and other parts of southern China have taken their cooking around the world and it has garnered respect for its emphasis on freshness, seasonality and leaving the ingredients to speak for themselves. But we can’t ignore the claims of Sichuanese food, heavily flour-based northern food or the fantastic dumplings, fatty pork, eels or crabs of Shanghai.

Anyone coming from a European culinary tradition, where one wine is matched with one dish, also needs to create a new head space where they are dealing with many dishes being on the table at the same time. This might mean creating new rules – or even better, guidelines – for that situation but that’s part of the fun of experimentation.

If you think about a European dish there may be one predominant flavour that is likely to be balanced or matched by a single wine, such as the tomatoes in a pasta sauce. However the wine will also have to cope with garnishes such as fresh herbs, freshly milled black pepper and Parmesan cheese. A simple steak is well matched with a good Bordeaux, but the wine may not only have to stand up to the richness of the beef but also the nuttiness of a baked potato.

This gives us a clue to dealing with the many dishes on a Chinese table. Think of one as the tomato sauce or the steak and think of the others as on a larger scale being like the different textures, garnishes and side dishes that the wine will have to accommodate.

Bear in mind that in the European tradition a meal will be three, four or more courses and that a different wine may be drunk with each course. The mingling of so many flavours with so many wines might seem intimidating but I defy anyone to eat three courses with wine and not be able to distinguish the different parts of a Neapolitan ice cream.

And with Chinese food it is all about the flavour which means that we can ditch ideas about colour. You may want to drink Chablis with your Bresse chicken or Pinot Noir with duck but the white meat/white wine and red meat/red wine rule of thumb is really irrelevant in a Chinese restaurant.

The lesson: why not have one red and one white open on the table at the same time? A number of wines can each highlight, exaggerate, intensify and absorb flavours and it is interesting to observe some of the interactions.

Let’s see how it works in practice.

There are dishes that leave the sommelier scared. Vinaigrettes have a well-know ability to flatten any white wine and exgerate bitterness in red. The humble artichoke has a fantastic ability to render wine harsh, metallic and bitter. There are certain Chinese dishes that will simply never work with wine, although not necessarily the spicy or chilli-laden dishes that you might expect.

Just like a vinaigrette, a sweet and sour dish will never work with a wine. They are sweetened to so high a level that they will turn the finest Burgundy to a watery, pinkish red juice. The best vintage Bordeaux will become an oaky washing up water. The acidity used to regulate the sweetness will flatten any red, white or Champagne – especially Champagne, which relies on acidity for its structure.

While it is common to have a sweet and sour dish in a meal but they will not dominate all the other food flavours on offer, so the chances of these dishes causing havoc are pretty negligible.

Oyster sauce is everywhere in the Chinese kitchen, not because the chefs are messy but because it is the basis of so many stocks and other sauces. It has a savoury flavour that enhances any wine from any region at any price point. Dab your finger in oyster sauce and then take a sip of your favourite wine – it doesn’t get much better.

Black bean sauce is a humble and unattractive ingredient that is most notable for being excessively salty and bitter on its own. When used to give flavour to dishes such as fried beef hor fun, or even steamed river fish, its saltiness is a great platform for fruity flavours and cuts through oakiness. The condiment will always dampen oaky flavours and exaggerate fruity enjoyment.

There is no better affinity with freshness and succulence of fresh chopped ginger and seafood. And ginger is indispensable when it comes to unwooded whites. Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, unoaked Chardonnay and some Viognier – the flavoursome richness of ginger permeates into white grapes, giving support and bringing a new dimension to lighter white wines. These wines are also good with lighter style dishes, not necessarily seafood.

Chilli and spices are often thought to be a difficult match. They are two different things though and in Chinese cooking few spices are used that generate a chilli type heat. The conventional wisdom is that chilli heat will drown out the flavour of the wine. But different people have different tolerances to chilli heat. What an Indonesian considers mild might blow the roof off her Western husband’s mouth.

Despite different perceptions of heat, it is ce