There is a lot of buzz about China’s increasing thirst for fine red wine — a thirst that may drive up the price for connoisseurs here in North America. But there isn’t much press about what China (and the rest of Asia) is giving back to occidental wine lovers. As part of my continuing series on wine from far-flung places, this week’s Short Cellar looks at Asian wines.
For instance, one of the oddest wines that I’ve ever had came from Thailand. Monsoon Valley’s 2009 “White” ($10.95 [Ed. Note: No longer available] from Kolonaki wine agents) springs to mind; it’s blended from the indigenous Malaga Blanc and Colombard grapes with the hopeless ambition of creating a wine that can pair with the sweet/sour/spicy flavours of Tom Yom soup. The resulting beverage is remarkably viscous and chewy for something with only a dab of residual sugar. The melon-like flavours are flat and bitter, but the most striking quality is a bouquet of overgrown vegetation and composting fruit. Novelty value: high. Value value: low.
I was curious about why anyone would want to start a winery in a place like South Asia, so I asked Tony Lima — a wine economist at California State University. As countries in Asia get richer and develop solid middle classes, the demand for wine naturally swells. But because of local pride and preferences, Professor Lima says that these customers are more likely to shift away from imported wines to domestic vintages, especially if the local price is lower. As wealth increases, Asian tastes become somewhat westernized, but in the process, they create a uniquely Asian interpretation of wine.
I recently stumbled upon such a cultural hybrid in the LCBO: Great Wall’s 1996 Cabernet Sauvignon ($13.95) from China. Normally, finding any wine that’s 14 years old on a store shelf is exciting, but when the price is 14 bucks, it seems eerie. This bottle begins to make more sense, however, if you keep in mind that well-aged Bordeaux has an especially high cache in China as a symbol of luxury and status. By marketing a table wine with serious bottle maturity, Great Wall is trying to romance the market.
Unfortunately, I found little evidence of bottle maturity when I tasted the Great Wall, which makes me suspect that there’s a miscommunication between this wine and its label. It has also disappeared from the LCBO’s computer system, which raises my suspicions. In any case, this wine displays a horsey and aggressive aroma with notes of diesel, black liquorice and vegetables. Novelty value: extremely high. Value value: extremely low. Melamine value: ?
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.
Photo by Jim Winstead