中國造酒商尋找自己的釀酒源地
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 thanreflecting 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
No comments:
Post a Comment