Asian wines gain respect in global restaurants
Wine makers in the region have made dizzying progress in recent years, producing a fine selection of Asian wines which pair exquisitely with Asian foods
Would you like a glass of white from Bordeaux - or Bali? How about something from the Asoke Valley in Thailand? Thanks to advanced viticultural techniques and a growing appetite for wine in Asia, it is now possible to buy high-quality wines from across Asia, including the hard-to-reach foothills of the Himalayas and hitherto unthinkable locations in the tropics.
Add that to a growing stable of excellent wines from Japan and China and there have never before been as many good Asian options for wine.
“Russian roulette is not my style and, in the past, that was the case with a lot of Asian wines,” says Eddie McDougall, the so-called Flying Winemaker, who lends the moniker to an online wine shop and a travel show about wine in Asia. That has changed in recent years. “It is not a gimmick anymore. I think ‘eat local, drink local’ sits well with a lot of people.”
It certainly sits well with a growing number of Hong Kong restaurants, such as Above & Beyond at Hotel Icon, where sommelier Ace Lee likes to pair dishes such as baked spareribs in tomato and vinegar with Grace Vineyard Tasya’s 2012 Reserve Marselan, which is from Shanxi province. The vineyard sits at a fairly high altitude, in a region with a large variation between day and night temperatures. “That creates a more intense, concentrated juice in the grape,” he says. Its full-bodied fruitiness makes it a good match for dishes with a bright, acidic sauce.
Over the past two decades, foreign and Chinese winemakers alike have established vineyards in the country’s north, from Shandong in the east to Xinjiang in the west. But some have set their eyes on more unusual locations, such as the highlands of Yunnan, where French winemaker Maxence Dulou produced an acclaimed cabernet sauvignon cabernet franc for Moët Hennessy.
Dubbed Ao Yun, the wine’s grapes are grown in a series of terraced plots nearly 2,600 metres above sea level - high enough that visitors to the vineyard must be accompanied by an oxygen tank. Because the electricity supply in the area is unreliable, vines are destemmed by hand. While other Chinese wine regions suffer from high humidity, Ao Yun’s vineyard is bone dry, which prevents fungus and mildew, allowing everything to be farmed organically.
I think ‘eat local, drink local’ sits well with a lot of people
“The journey they’ve gone through is quite amazing,” says Gary Pluck, wine manager for Aqua Restaurant Group, who has created an Ao Yun tasting menu at Hutong. The unique terroir - not just the elevation, but also the short, intense amount of daylight - means there are 160 days between flower and harvest, more than a month longer than in Bordeaux.