Part 2 - Dalian Delights: Seafood and the Wine Scene off China¡¯s North-East Coast Continued(2)
I say shake things because in a young wine market like China’s traditional packaging, cork closures and red wines generally reign supreme, even although most Chinese palates prefer lighter reds with generally low tannins (e.g. from wines made from grapes like Gamay or Pinot Noir) or whites with some residual sugar. So we’d deliberately chosen a wine under cork as a gift, albeit the plastic cork of the above Lo Tengo Torrontes before arriving in Dalian. Now, here we were a) bringing white wine to the table, b) choosing a wine in a one-litre format not standard 75 cl bottle and c) purchasing something in less than ‘classy’ packaging. We could ‘keep face’ doing this only because of our professional work and knowledge of international wines. As a result everyone in the family tried the Aussie Chardonnay and ostensibly liked it. But it was Fongyee’s younger cousins who actually drank most of the tetra-pak, saying how well the wine went with the beautiful Dalian clams on offer.
So let’s explode a few myths and report on what we learned or confirmed: it is not correct to say the Chinese struggle to drink alcohol, even wine, or are blind to trying new things (we hear a lot of importers here who insist the Chinese will only try certain types of wine ‡° ignore them. It’s more a matter of education all round). The only Chinese who don’t drink much tend to be Cantonese. They lack alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that processes alcohol ‡° hence the pink-in-the-face routine after half a glass. These ‘wine drinkers’ should try Moscato d’Asti or another low-alcohol wine with decent residual sugar and pleasant, easy-to-like aromas. Northern Chinese drink like the Russians and Koreans: don’t take them on, particularly with bai jiu. The older generation are unlikely to be great wine buyers, unless they are highly affluent. It’s China younger drinkers who are coming to Western brands in all forms. Where wine may have the edge, though, is that it is perceived to be healthier than spirits. White wine may not be well-known, but younger drinkers will try just about anything and choosing and drinking international wines has social cachet.
The Dalian wine-lists we saw ‡° in our hotel and a few restaurants ‡° were dominated by the more significant importers here, particularly ASC and Torres China. But the wine scene is very young. However, there’s certainly a fair bit of cash knocking around this popular Chinese city with massive building developments and the predictable run of black S-Class Mercedes ducking between scooters and vehicles of all other descriptions.
On our final day, we visited a local Buddhist temple and monastery. From a distance, this countryside retreat could have dated from the Ming or Qing Dynasties. But as we came up close, it looked newer and newer, in fact, very new! (Not that this necessarily meant it was new. Beijing’s Ming Dynasty Forbidden City is, for example, under constant restoration and re-painting). But this place was genuinely young. A group of wealthy Buddhists had built the entire thing from scratch as recently as 2004. As we thought about this massive undertaking, we wondered if the Chinese Buddhists in question ‡° generally, more laid back than their Japanese Zen or Lamaist Tibetan counterparts ‡° were also buying wine for their festivals and holidays. Judging by the SUVs and luxury cars lining the car-park of this working temple, many of these Chinese Buddhists could certainly afford to buy wine and perhaps a few of them are.
