The five wines sampled by Eric Asimov were "competently
made" but lacked "any sense of distinctiveness." (Eric is an American wine critic and food
critic for The
New York Times.)
When I
mentioned to a colleague that I was going to try a few Chinese wines, he looked
at me sadly and said, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? The
group of five red wines I tried have no reason to apologize. They were all competently made and can stand with pride among the
ranks of commercial wines produced and sold all over the world. What they lack
is any sense of
distinctiveness, or, to use a bit of wine jargon (造酒專門術語), terroir.(地質)
Terroir is
often thought to be the soil in which wine grapes are grown, but in fact it
represents much more than that. It’s also the microclimate, the elevation, the
exposure to the sun and the human element. In the Old World, where wine has
been made for centuries, this human element is not only the hand of the
winemaker but often an expression of the community and culture reflected in the
wine. In the New World, where making wine is more often a commercial effort,
the human element more tends to reflect an entrepreneurial spirit. These
Chinese wines are entrepreneurial in nature. Their reason for being is
primarily to win an audience rather than reflecting ages-old traditions.
Because
Bordeaux (法國葡萄產地) is so prized in China, most Chinese wine producers use
it as a model. Why not? If you are going to start making wine virtually from
scratch, and you are ambitious, it stands to reason that you would base the
wine on what you regard as the best.
So it was
with these Chinese wines, made primarily of the two leading Bordeaux grapes,
cabernet sauvignon and merlot, and a third, cabernet gernischt, which is
identical to camenière, an old Bordeaux grape that is now primarily grown in
Chile. Like most Bordeaux, these are medium-weight wines with alcohol in the
low- to midrange, 12 to 13.5 percent, and, for the most part, very drinkable.
The wines,
which are not available in the United States, included two entry-level bottles,
the 2013 Val Enchanté Reserve from Silver Heights and the 2013 Gutenland Cuvée
from Kanaan Winery, which were appropriately soft, simple and easygoing; one
midlevel wine, the 2010 Moser Family from Chateau Changyu Moser XV, which
showed a bit of complexity; and two high-end wines, the 2011 Legacy Peak and a
magnum of 2011 Emma’s Reserve from Silver Heights. The Emma’s Reserve bore all
the hallmarks of ambition: deep, plush flavors and lots of oak, which came from
prolonged aging in 100 percent new oak barrels from France. This is typical of
many expensive start-up wines: without a singular terroir, they instead reflect
the winemaking attributes of luxury wines.
I don’t
fault any of the wines — no apologies needed. China is a young winemaking
country, with a lot of money and resources. Based on these five wines, I have
no doubt it will find its way in short order to making a wide range of commercially acceptable wines. Whether it will make the sort of
distinctive bottles prized by wine lovers will take longer and require more
experimentation to determine.
Fwd by Rosie
Chu (朱露西同學提供)
11/10/2015
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