Thai Treats (1)

If you have never tasted Thai wines, start now. There are some really excellent wines made here and I’ll introduce you to more of them in the next article.

Village Cellar wines are produced by the Village Farm Winery, which also produces the more up-market Chateau des Brumes range. The winery spreads over eighty acres of high ground, about 50 kms south of Nakhorn Ratchasima on Highway 304, at the northern edge of the Khao Yai National Park.

The Village Cellar range consists of two wines, a Chenin Blanc and this one, a blend of locally grown Shiraz and French Cabernet Sauvignon. First appearances are promising: a lovely ruby red colour and a pleasant clean aroma. To my nose, there are hints of strawberries, yeast and fresh tobacco. This is an elegant, very dry wine with excellent structure and well-balanced tannins. A faint note of strawberries comes through on the taste too and there is a long pleasing finish with a dash of citrus. It is actually quite sophisticated
and struck me as very French in character.

This is not surprising, for the wine is made by the French winemaker Jacques Bacou, who travels with his colleagues to Thailand every
year to oversee the harvest and the winemaking. The grapes are picked in the cool of the night to ensure optimum quality and only the best fruit from the hand-picked bunches is allowed to proceed into the winery.

If you like French dry reds from the Languedoc such as Fitou or Corbières, you will probably find this wine extremely agreeable. It’s a “food wine” if ever there was one. Try it with a hearty stew like Beef Bourguignon, or with Brie or Camembert.

This delightful wine is an excellent introduction to Khao Yai wines. It’s terrific value too. The grapes are handpicked, and the wine is partly aged in stainless steel tanks to preserve the attractive freshness. It is a light straw colour with a slightly oily, silky appearance. It looks good in the glass, which is always a pleasing start. There’s a very classy assertive aroma of pineapple and rich tropical fruit with slightly peppery overtones.

The taste comes as a pleasant surprise, for the wine tastes drier than expected, with a good body and an attractive freshness and soft acidity. There’s a long lingering aftertaste too – invariably the sign of a good wine. The aftertaste is slightly peppery with notes of lemon.

The slightly older PB Kao Yai Reserve 2006 (at Bt. 585) has a richer colour and the ageing in French barriques adds another, more subtle dimension to the aroma and flavour. Monsoon Valley White Shiraz 2008, Hua Hin Hills Vineyard, Thailand, (Siam Winery) (Bt. 450 at Villa).

Now here’s something rather fun. For a start, it’s not actually white at all. It’s pink, and a very delicate dusky shade of pink too. If you closed your eyes, you’d swear that you were drinking a young spritzy white wine. But with your eyes closed, you wouldn’t see the dusky pink, which would be a shame. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve always loved dusky pink.

This is the fist white Shiraz to be made in Thailand. As you probably know, Shiraz is almost always red. Very few wineries in the world have tried making white Shiraz, with the exception of a few Australian producers. In 2008, this “Flagship Wine” of Monsoon Valley won both silver and gold medals at international wine competitions, including the prestigious International Wine Challenge in Vienna. It’s not surprising, for this is a delightful wine.

This seems to be a drink that really wants to be glugged and enjoyed. With a light dry, body and a delicate hint of raspberries it has a lively, slightly frizzante body. There’s a pleasing touch of acidity too, which gives it a racy quality and an unexpectedly long finish, adding to the attraction.

Food? Don’t bother. This is such a light-hearted breezy little number that it can keep you entertained all on its own. It would be a brilliant welcome drink at a party or dinner to surprise and delight your guests. Serve it as cold as you dare. Oh, I almost forgot, it’s a lovely dusky pink too.