Writing

I’ve been writing about food and wine since 2012 — especially on my blog. Here are some of my favorite pieces I’ve written on wine, food, and Filipino identity.

On Filipino Food and Wine Pairings: An Experiment
With the flavours I chose and the wines I hypothesized might match, I came up with a matrix of 7 flavours and 13 wines for a total of 91 combinations which I decided to attack on a Friday afternoon. Delicious, but less fun than you think. Gulp.

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Pairing Adobo With Wine: On Shame and Chardonnay
Sometimes shame bleeds through survival and culture when you’re a child of Filipino immigrants.

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Pairing Lumpia and Pancit With Wine: On Journeys Through Filipinx Identity
On paper, coming up with wine pairings for lumpia and pancit seem like a difficult task because of the endless permutations of fillings, toppings, or styles.

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Pairing Pinakbet and Wine: On Limp Wrists and Verb Forms
The elders in my family used to say I inherited my mom’s appetite, and I never really understood what they meant until relatively recently.

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Pairing Longganisa and Beer: On Moving to San Francisco From Vancouver
In a culinary scenario I am fully not a big sausage person, but as I fry up the two types that I procured at the supermarket, the smell fills the house with nostalgia and I realize it’s been years since I’ve had longganisa.

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Pairing Piaparan Manok and Wine: On Some Men I’ve Dated and the Libations I Chose
I would never turn down a glass of Foradori’s Teroldego, but the memory is vaguely intertwined with this one person who was in the center of this weird Venn Diagram of plant gay, basketball zealot, and someone who has bad takes on Amy Adams in Arrival.

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Pairing Adobong Pula Achuete and Wine: On What Inspired Me To Get Into Wine
It was the first wine that gave me this almost ineffably grotesque and leathery animalistic shock balanced with the intensity of earthy pencil shavings and dark fruit, a divisiveness that spilled into the customers I excitedly suggested it to.

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Pairing Leche Flan and Spirits: On Desserts and Libations
Less saccharine desserts aside, there’s always something that’s bugged me about beverage pairings with sweets.

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