Goodbye Thailand, Hello Chile

Chile is the next stop on the year long, around the world, Wine Quality Crusade. We will be arriving in time to celebrate the New Year, and will be staying in South America until their harvest gets underway.

We have been exploring the lesser known parts of the world to uncover their hidden wine gems, and what a trip a has been so far. We are just over the halfway point and have visited seven countries, and discovered a veritable treasure trove of wines that are all but unheard of in the US.

Chile is not a secret you may point out. Certainly a look at the shelves in any wine outlet will uncover any number of selections. This is as true in Thailand as it is in North America. Take another look at those wines though. How many are entry priced, ready now quaffers?

This is the reputation that Chile has garnered around the world, and I am determined to see first hand if it is all they have to offer. My guess from afar? I expect to be wowed by an avalanche of high quality wines that have never been seen by the likes of myself and probably most of you.

Wines that are made in small quantities have an advantage when it comes to quality, but the disadvantage when it comes to distribution. The small lots allow the winemaker to use a hands on approach, but if there are only a few hundred cases made, chances are you are not going to find it in your local grocery store.

This doesn't mean that I only think small volume wines are capable of high quality. Nor does it mean that I have not had high quality wines from Chile in the past. I am just in search of what I am missing.

One of the fun things about wine is that you can not possibly know everything about it. There are always more surprises to be had. Wine touring is a non stop adventure in vinous discovery. There is always something new, something to share with your friends, and new favorites waiting to be discovered.

Next week I jet half way around the world to end up closer to where I started, but still a world away from the common wines that most of us find in our favorite stores. I will be meeting amazing people, seeing incredible sights, and of course, tasting fabulous wines, and I will be reporting it all back here to you.

Asia, the 800 Pound Gorilla

Almost 30% of the World's landmass resides within the continent of Asia. The rich culture often predates that of the West, and so it is even with wine. Granted that wine here took a different path, as I have written about so often in the past, but wine there was.

As the promise of the Global Marketplace becomes a reality it should come as no surprise that many of the billions of people that occupy Asia have come to love wine. Wine from Europe, the Americas, Australasia, and yes, even wine from Asia.

I have experienced first hand wine in India, China and Thailand, and recently got to taste wines from Japan as well. Make no mistake about it, when I say wine I mean fermented grapes and not rice or fruit.

India and Thailand have impressed me the most, but that may be due to circumstance. The Japanese wines I tasted were well traveled and presented at a busy tasting where I could not really take time to appreciate them. Chinese wines I mostly tasted over 10 years ago, and while the industry has progressed a great deal since then, I have not had another chance to taste the wines at the source.

I did taste Chinese wines along with the Japanese, Thai and Indian wines at the recent tasting, and nothing I had changed my mind about where my favorite wines are coming from. That is mostly a matter of taste, not a comment on the winemaking or varietal choices of China and Japan. I like big fruity wines, and the warm weather growing regions of Thailand and India are happy to oblige.

China remains the big player in Asia with over 50% of the continent's 800 wineries. Japan comes in second with another 25% followed by India and then Thailand. Other players include Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Cambodia. Most of the countries in the last group have token wine presences.

So how big is China actually? It ranks in the top 10 of world producers. It has almost 173,000 acres of wine grapes, and it is growing fast. China also consumes a good deal of wine and is the World's fastest growing major major wine market with an average of 15% annual growth. About 90% of the wine consumed in China originates in China, but that leaves a healthy 10% for imports, and that number may grow as demand exceeds supply.

The Japanese are the great wine consumers of Asia and they make a wide variety of styles that you won't find anywhere else. Most Western visitors to Japan probably don't even think to look for the local wines, but they are missing out on a range of flavors that they may well enjoy experimenting with.

India and Thailand have had their moment in the sun in this blog, so I will only add that India's wine producing region is almost all centered around an area just east of Mumbai. Thailand is the new kid on the block, but what I have seen in my visits here have been not only promising, but a revelation. I would never have thought that a sub-tropical climate could produce such quality wine.

Few Asian wines can be found abroad, and even if they are they are certain to suffer to some degree from travel fatigue. This is a good excuse for the wine adventurous to travel to these countries to learn for themselves about this emerging force in the wine industry. The New Old World Wines if you will.

Cambodia: Wines and Restaurants

Siem Reap is the gateway city to Angkor Wat and the surrounding temples. It is a town that has grown up around tourism, and goes out of its way to accommodate the many tastes of the visitors. It is also a town awash with wine. Sometimes at decent prices, sometimes at scandalous rates of mark up.

As with almost everywhere in South East Asia that we have been, the wines have suffered form the heat of storage and travel. This tends to turn even the most hearty of reds into a thin and simple quaff, while taking any hope of freshness out of the whites. The better hotels can hold onto the wine long enough for this travel sickness to cure itself, but most of the other establishments do not have that luxury.

It is so prevalent that we met one bar owner who had sworn off all wine until he returns to visit his native France. An extreme point of view, but not altogether unrealistic. Instead of eschewing all wine, we just kept to the lower priced wines except at the very finest eateries.

Even the roadside lunch halls have wine, albeit of the more generic type. This is a nod to the tourists that flock to the temples, but also to the history of French colonization that took place only a generation or so ago.

The restaurants ranged from simple to the point of being frightening (at least from a sanitation point of view) to the most lavish. We mostly hovered around the middle.

One of our favorites is the East Indian Curry Restaurant high atop the Claremont Angkor Hotel, across the river from most of the action. The food was really very good, with a butter chicken that I will be craving for years. The aloo paratha. was fresh and as good as any we got in India. Their wine list was small but adequate, and reasonably priced. They lacked my first choice of a Riesling or other sweeter white to go with the food, so I found that dry red actually worked better than I had expected.

On the busier side of the river, but a good stone's throw from the Claremont Hotel is FCC (Foreign Correspondence Club). With a dining room that spills out into the courtyard and bright white plantation decor, it is every bit as romantic as the name suggests. The menu which is far reaching, is printed in the form of a newspaper, keeping with the theme. Their Khmer (Cambodian) Sampler is a great way to get a taste of the local food, but if you get a chance try a butter chicken pizza. OK, so I am showing an almost obsessive fondness for butter chicken, but you will be amazed how well it works as a pizza.

The wine list at FCC is pretty decent, but none too cheap. The Spanish wines went particularly well with the food and setting.

We also visited a wine bar with the name Aha which in Khmer means food, but sounds delightful to English speakers. This is a tapas joint with a few selections from the wok that can be prepared various ways. We had a fun tasting of 6 red wines, but they failed to impress me. All of the choices they had by the glass were similar in style. Shiraz and Cab based they looked and tasted pretty much the same, and since they have yet to learn my trick for marking the glasses, they were very hard to keep straight. I would have liked to see a bit more variety in the offerings.

The food was good, especially the Khmer Wedding Tapas with its dried beef, dried shrimp, pork terrine and freshly roasted cashews. The Tuna Carpaccio was less inspiring, although it was fresh and decent. The green papaya it was served with didn't pop with the fish for me, like the more traditional wasabi would have. One of my favorite tastes of the evening was a brie crepe with apples spiced with cumin. This rather savory dessert was a treat and a set of flavors I would not have thought of combining before this.

If, or I really should say when, you decide to visit the marvels of the Angkor Temples be prepared to spend more than a few nights exploring the rich gastronomical choices of Siem Reap. The traditional foods were as always the most successful, but if you stay out of the more obvious tourist traps you will likely enjoy yourself.

The night life of the town is legendary, and while we popped into the famous Angkor What bar to rub shoulders with the 20 something (and 20 wantabes) who were drinking $10 pitchers of Long Island Ice Teas, we kept to the $3 glasses of Black Label scotch all around town. It was perfect to wash down the french fries and other finger foods we ordered as we crawled our way along Pub Street. Life isn't just about fine food and great bottles of wine.

In case you were wondering, there is a Cambodian wine, but try as we may we couldn't get a hold of a bottle.