(Beijing) This Chinese red wine has been eyeing us on the hotel menu for 10 days now.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
We should try local products, said to me in the elevator Glotte Sensible, in the tone of “do you game of parachuting? “.
Was it homesickness, fatigue, the disappointment of the women’s short track relay, I don’t know, these things cannot be explained.
I said yes, since you only live once.
Tonight, we’re trying Chinese wine.
” Its good. But it’s not wine”, declared the third man in the elevator, a French colleague from whom, however, we had not asked for any tasting notes.
It goes without saying that a Frenchman in a restricted space hearing about wine has a kind of republican duty to opine on any wine issue discussed in his presence. I don’t act otherwise when strangers talk about spruce in front of me.
Still, at our hotel, the wine list is made up of a list of two options. The Changyu at $25. And the Changyu from a prestigious cuvée with French words on it, for $100.
We chose the base vintage.
“It does the job,” concluded Glotte Sensible, after clearly spending more time photographing the bottle than analyzing its contents.
As for me, I would dare to say that it is very drinkable, moderately concentrated, a little woody without anything vulgar, but perhaps a little overcooked in the corners, testifying to a breeding in a desert climate or a storage too close to the compressor.
My subtle master Jacques Benoit would surely have given a note with one decimal which he would have transposed into a half-star. I often ask him for his opinion.
Be aware, however, that the Changyu house, founded at the end of the 19and century, when no one here drank wine but the Christian colonial masters, this house, therefore, would be the 10and world wine producer.
China, until the early 1980s, produced and consumed almost no wine. It is a land of beer and hard liquor. She is now a major wine producer.
Some rank it second in the world, but we must distinguish between grapes (China is the number one producer) and wine. According to Statista, a generally reliable source, and ForbesChina is in 10and place in the world for the volume of wine produced, the top three still being Italy, France and Spain.
All the same, thousands of hectares of vines have been planted in several regions of China, particularly around the Gobi desert. Renowned oenologists have come here as consultants. And alongside the Changyu of this world, whose best cuvées are now sold in Paris, many small houses stand out. Robert Parker, the pope of wine report cards, rated 10 Chinese wines above 90%. Bettane and Desseauve, famous French critics, gave their blessing to 24 Chinese wines, granting them a passing score of 13 out of 20 and more.
Paradoxically, in China, Chinese wine is received by many new rich with snobbery, wine imported from the “real” regions of origin being more popular.
But whatever people say about it in the bourgeois circles of Beijing and in the Olympic elevators, according to Glotte Sensible and me, it is indeed wine.