It’s Fasika (Easter) in Ethiopia. My dear friend Menbere Muluneh and I have travelled from our respective homes in Canada to visit her family near Lake Bishoftu, a small agricultural community south of the capital of Addis Ababa. We are deep in the Rift Valley basin, a broad inland depression filled with farmlands and hippo-filled lakes. The small, plastered home Menbere grew up in is on a red earth street, shaded by trees and the neighbours’ tin fences.
I’m baking in the shade. My back is sticking to a plastic lawn chair, positioned strategically under the great arms of an acacia tree in the yard. I raise a fresh little cup of coffee to my lips, the sheen of the coffee bean oil glistening on the surface of the steaming liquid. Laced with sugar and fresh rue leaves, it’s powerfully fragrant, complex and very, very sweet. I carefully sit the little cup down next to a short tumbler glass of red wine on the tiny plastic table.
After 40 days of abstaining from animal-derived food, sex, alcohol and other pleasures, the Orthodox Christian family’s vices are back in full force. A hairy goat skin is piled on other hairy carcasses out on the street, waiting for pick-up, the last evidence of the animal slaughtered and roasted in the courtyard. Satiated and relaxed, the family’s attention is now focused on the Ethiopian national sport of prolonged conversation.
As her niece serves the coffee in an elaborate two-hour ceremony, and her siblings chat in Amharic, Menbere tells me about growing up in the surrounding countryside. To fund her education as a nurse, she would pick grapes and prune the vines at a nearby Rift Valley vineyard between university semesters.
I ask how long grapes have been grown in the sandy, volcanic soils, but no one sitting under the acacia tree seems to know. Some guess it predates Mussolini’s invasion in 1935; others guess the Queen of Sheba brought vines home from her dalliance with King Solomon 3,000 years ago. In any case, grape wine has a long regional history in the fertile soils of the Rift Valley. Menbere explains to me how the Easter traditions include wine. When she was a child, her father would buy wide bulbous bottles, the bottoms covered with woven grass, very much like the fiascos I’ve seen holding restaurant candles on the Tuscan coast. The children would take a bottle to their godmother’s house, trading the wine and fresh bread for a new set of clothes. She gestures, smiling, at her littlest niece, wearing a fresh, white traditional dress, and the glass of wine beside my coffee cup. I sip the sweet, chilled, fruity red wine and raise my glass with a grin. The tradition is alive and well.
A Bordeaux-shaped bottle perched on another plastic table shows a glossy brand label with the words “acacia” and “medium sweet” proudly displayed in English and Amharic. It’s the top-selling wine from Castel Ethiopia. In 2007, representatives from France’s largest wine producer, Castel Group, visited Ethiopia. After a key meeting in the Prime Minister’s office, the French drinks powerhouse decided to invest in the Ethiopian wine industry. Castel planted vineyards around the Rift Valley’s Lake Ziway, more famous internationally for its monkey-infested hot springs and hippo-watching than for viticulture. Top technology was imported from afar, and the winemaking team got to work understanding the Ethiopian palate. Today, according to Ermias Meshesha, Castel Ethiopia’s sales manager, three of Castel Ethiopia’s top four selling wines have “sweet” in their titles.
In contrast to the European approach of drinking wine with food, wine in Ethiopia is rarely paired with cuisine. Foreigners, or ferengi as we are called, might be forgiven for assuming that the most popular, sugary wines are crafted to complement the searing heat of Ethiopian traditional foods. That’s not the reason at all. Ethiopia’s finest wines, such as Castel’s Rift Valley Chardonnay, are completely dry. These highly concentrated wines, laced with mineral salts derived from the Rift Valley’s volcanic soils, stand up delightfully to spiced platters in Addis Ababa’s restaurants. Yet most bottles of Ethiopian wine are bought at grocery stores to share when friends or family come over. As coffee is the most important part of Ethiopian visiting culture, wine is naturally served with respect before, after or during a coffee ceremony.
To confer honour on a guest, expensive sugar is always served with the coffee. The presence of sugar is so important in the coffee ceremony, Ethiopia’s very poor serve coffee with a little side dish of salt, mimicking the presence of sugar. Wine is expected to share the same balance of bitterness and sweetness, to complement the most precious liquid on the plastic table, coffee.
The Ethiopian and Thai wine industries share similarities, even though they are half a world away from each other. The vineyards at Ethiopia’s Lake Ziway, at 8 degrees north, contend with baboons, hippos and the Rift Valley’s astounding flocks of migratory birds. Thailand’s vineyards in the Hua Hin Hills are located right beside an elephant sanctuary, also battling bird attacks in the tropical location of 12 degrees north. Neither climate allows grapevines to go dormant. In Ethiopia, there are four seasons – the small rains, the small harvest, the big rains, and the big harvest. Wine grapes are harvested at the end of the longest, driest harvest season. In Thailand, there is one vast monsoon period with only a short dry break for grape growing and harvesting. And like Ethiopians, most Thai people appreciate their beverages sweet.
In the 1980s, Thai business mogul Chalerm Yoovidhya (the eldest son of Red Bull co-creator Chaleo Yoovidhya), set out on a mission – to create a culture of wine in Thailand, a country that had never commercially produced wine. With the knowledge that a wine-loving culture is not built in a day, Yoovidhya opted to play a long game. He founded Siam Winery and first crafted SPY, a sweet, fruity cooler with wine as the base ingredient. The intent was to bridge the locally beloved flavour of fruit juice into a fermented drink, and prime the consumer palate for a broader appreciation of wine. In 2002, he took the next step by launching Monsoon Valley, a vineyard and restaurant experience in the lush Hua Hin Hills.
Suppached Sasomsin is the deputy director of innovation and winemaking at Siam Winery. With a European Master’s degree, and winemaking experience across three continents, Suppached has a decidedly global view of the world of wine. Although I would much prefer to walk the Monsoon Valley vineyards with him in Thailand, Suppached graciously meets me online to describe his wines.
Flashing a ready grin, Suppached explains that Monsoon Valley’s top wines are delicate and fragrant, with elegant aromas from the sandy soils, and a lighter body, as grapes can just barely ripen between the monsoon seasons. When I reference the acclaim the wines have achieved in international competitions, he explains to me the elegance naturally produced by the physical terroir is also beloved by Thailand’s expats. The vineyard’s visitors bundle a day of feeding elephants at the nearby sanctuary, with a gourmet meal at the winery’s restaurant, where 70% of their mid- and top-tier wines are sold in Thailand. The rest are strategically placed on five-star restaurant menus in Bangkok, again, for the enjoyment of mainly international guests with global tasting experience.
I’m fascinated that Thailand’s natural wine terroir is producing quality wines largely unappreciated by the local population. I ask Suppached about the base level wines that he describes as simple, sweet and fruity. Designed to pair with Thailand’s varied, fragrant cuisine, surely they must be a hit with the locals?
Suppached explains that all of the basic Monsoon Valley wines are now exported to the UK for sale in British Thai restaurants. Wine is prohibitively expensive in Thailand due to taxation, so not everyone can afford to try it. Of those Thai locals who can afford wine, most are used to the more established imports from Australia: affordable, tannic Cabernets and powerful Chardonnays. The average Thai wine lover has a palate developed to appreciate the climatic offerings of Down Under: heavier in alcohol from inland heat, with riper fruit from Australia’s high sun exposure. The abbreviated Thai growing season and short daytime sunlight prohibits fruit development, to the extent that it is not possible to grow Chardonnay at all.
Thai wine culture is indeed blossoming as a tourism product for digital nomads and global explorers. Served in a lush vineyard paradise, I imagine Thai wine is an unbeatable sensory experience. Personally, I can’t wait to visit, study the tropical terroir, and feed some elephants. Meanwhile, Siam Winery’s original wine-based drink SPY, meant to introduce the joys of fermented grape juice to the Thai people, is now the most popular alcoholic beverage with Thai women. Perhaps the long game is still in play.
The Chinese are masters of the long game. Some of the world’s earliest genetic records of wine – from grapes or hawthorn fruit, mixed with honey mead and rice malt – originated in the Henan province and date back to the Neolithic period, circa 7,000 BC. According to Master of Wine Fongyee Walker, who first studied traditional Chinese literature at Cambridge before she fell in love with wine, early Tang Dynasty poems from the 8th century BC mention drinking wine. Catholic missionaries brought European vitis vinifera vines to the Himalayan foothills around 200 years ago. The domestic wine industry has boomed over the last few decades in China, and although exact figures are hard to find, the country is estimated to produce about as much wine as Portugal.
Fongyee, one of China’s leading wine educators and consultants, is back from her Asian home base to visit her family in Vancouver, Canada. We chat on the phone as she cooks for her father, and I pull weeds in the garden. Entirely fluent in both Canadian and Chinese cultures, Fongyee explains to me why and how the Chinese drink wine today. The differences are marked between aspirational urban wine drinkers, and those in the grape-growing countryside.
China’s contemporary urban wine culture, thriving in the bustling metropolises of Beijing and Shanghai, is much more influenced by the wine-producing regions of Europe than by China’s own industry. In the big Chinese cities, people share bottles in restaurants and other public venues to prove their social standing, or indicate their worth. The most affluent people will purchase Bordeaux or Burgundy – the more renowned the estate, the more face, or status, a person accrues. The prestige of the brand is the bottle’s most crucial ingredient, not necessarily how it tastes. Chinese wine is also purchased according to brand, and the most sought-after home-grown wines are those that mimic the wine styling of Europe’s most established regions, in and on the bottle. Better yet, the most successful brands have direct links to Europe, such as LVMH-owned Ao Yun, Lafite’s Long Dai and Changyu-Moser XV.
In general, according to Fongyee, wine is not a primarily premium beverage in China because of its taste – it’s because of its reputation and price. As she chops vegetables and I pluck radishes from the garden bed, she dives a little deeper.
Drinking alcohol, Fongyee explains, is a very important part of Chinese culture, because it’s a tool to cement relationships. When people get drunk together, they loosen up, they joke, and they connect with each other in a more intimate way than everyday etiquette permits. As an alcoholic beverage, wine is no exception. Normally only very rich people can afford to get drunk on wine, but if they can afford it, it accomplishes two goals – building connections with others and gaining prestige in the process.
Although wine is made across many regions in China, there is one area where wine is affordable, in comparison to the grain-based spirits, typically a tenth of the price in most of China. Far inland from the coastal cities, in the northwestern reaches of China, the Xinjiang province is a grape-growing powerhouse. The land is so dry that most of the mountain rivers simply disappear into the desert, or end in salty lakes. High mountain vineyards, at ear-splitting altitudes, are farmed by the majority Muslim population. They grow grapes for raisin production, and to supply bulk wine to the better-known brands across the country.
Fongyee fondly recalls a trip she recently made to visit Xinjiang’s vineyards. She says it’s the only region she’s visited in China where middle-class people get together and drink bottles of wine made in the same region. The wine is robust, tannic and high alcohol – typically Cabernet Sauvignon – and just as powerful as the dishes of roasted lamb and chicken slathered in chilli sauce the locals love. Not that they actually pair wine with their meals. No, according to Fongyee, the generous people of Xinjiang first eat together, and then the drinking begins.
On the other side of the world, Brazilians also celebrate with their local wines. As in Thailand, wine is a highly taxed drink in Brazil – it’s not cheap. Due to economic disparities in the country, wine traditionally has been a drink for the few; however, since the 1990s a middle class has emerged that is thirsty for wine. In contrast to other countries like China with high import volumes, Brazilians are also fiercely proud of their local drink, and their preferred wine is that which they make themselves.
Contrary to the robust flavours favoured by the mountainous people of Xinjiang, Brazilians enjoy soft, lush and mellow flavours. This is the land of plenty – the southern nation grows a dazzling variety of juicy fruits, including grapes, and produces about as much wine each year as Greece or Georgia. Although the vast country grows over 200 varieties of mangoes alone, Brazil only has a few key areas where they can grow healthy vinifera grapes. So the majority of Brazilian wine is made from hybrid grapes. These fungus-tolerant, vigorous vines can withstand the moisture from the rainforest and the oceans, but may be farmed more with quantity rather than quality in mind.
More than half of Brazil’s wines are made with the hybrid grape Isabel (or Isabella in English). Never having tasted it myself, I make a video call to my friend Paulo Brammer, who runs Brazil’s biggest wine school. As I sit out in my sun-drenched backyard vineyard in Canada, he joins me, jaunty in wool hat and snow coat, from a South American ski lodge, where he is teaching wine aficionados après ski.
In his characteristically frank way, Paulo gives me a typical Isabel tasting note: sweet, and tastes like grape juice. It turns out that this amazingly adaptive grape makes as much non-fermented grape juice as it does fermented wine. Isabel is made into red, white, rosé, but it tastes simple, sweet and decidedly like fruit juice. I ask if it is similar to inexpensive Argentinian Malbec, which is the top imported variety into Brazil. No – he says with his chipped British/Portuguese cheek – sweeter, with less alcohol and less acid.
Although they are a staple on supermarket shelves, Isabel-derived wines are ceding shelf space to the fastest-growing group of bottles – sparkling wine. Brazilians have an insatiable thirst for their own fizz; two thirds of the bubbles consumed in the country come from their own vineyards.
Brazil’s fan favourite is sparkling Moscatel – deliciously quaffable, sweet and ripe with aromas of pineapple and peach – with the bubbles captured in a single fermentation, similar to Moscato d’Asti made with the same grape variety. This is a party wine. Young people grab bottles off the grocery shelves when they go out at night, and post Instagram pictures toasting on balconies and splashing each other with exploding bottles. Brazilian rap, funk, samba and pop music is full of references to sparkling wine, and these relatively inexpensive bubbles are the accessible version. Drinking sparkling Moscatel is a way for young people to show they are up and coming through the class ranks, determining their own culture and destiny. It’s hip, wildly popular, and aspirational.
In contrast to sparkling Moscatel’s fun-first culture, a serious attempt is being made by some Brazilian wineries to create traditional-method wines that compete with Champagne and Franciacorta on the world stage. The new Altos de Pinto Bandeira area is leading the charge, a cool, temperate region resplendent in waterfalls and verdant forests.
Leaning into the camera at the ski lodge, Paulo tells me that the wines crafted in this area are on the way to becoming something quite special, and still quite Brazilian. Made from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and the often-underestimated Riesling Itálico, they mimic the biscuity character of other international lees-aged sparkling wines, but have a slightly softer profile than their global counterparts. Paulo surmises this is because the tartaric acid in top Brazilian sparkling wines is a few grams less than in top examples from other countries around the world. I wonder if the relative softness is because of the grey, acidic soils found in the high-altitude Pinto Bandeira vineyards – wine acid often has an inverse relationship with soil acidity.
I’m digging in my backyard vineyard, planting a handful of baby vines. I’ve been working at building up organic content in the soil; my shovel cuts through several layers of decomposing clover and mustard cover crops to the harder clay loam underneath. Like much of the Okanagan Valley, my little western Canadian vineyard is planted on glacial till. In the last ice age, massive North American glaciers ground up rocks in their path, depositing the granite underneath the ice. Today, the Okanagan Valley is a semi-arid desert in southcentral British Columbia. We have mainly alkaline soils, which, in exact contrast to Pinto Bandeira, cultivate extremely high acid wines.
The baby vines I’m tucking into my little test plot were a gift from the Kitsch family, who own a small estate winery just up the hill. The growing conditions for their vines, as well as for my little test plot, are extremely, well, extreme. Far from the Pacific Ocean, in the rain shadow of the Coastal Mountains, there is not enough moisture to grow grapes without irrigation. Our vineyards are fed water from the vast Okanagan Lake, just a short walk from my house.
Even though the growing season is short, the summer days are extremely long due to our high latitude of 50 degrees north. Relentless summer sunshine ensures our Okanagan grapes ripen quickly and fully, and typically have juicy, pure fruit character. In the winter, it’s routinely -25˚C, in the summer, often +40˚C. Yet even in the baking heat of the summer, the nights cool down, preserving high levels of acid in the grapes. This combination of racing high acid and bright, pristine fruit is the hallmark of Okanagan Valley terroir.
In British Columbia, we wine-lovers cheerfully refer to ourselves as acid freaks (there have been t-shirts made). We bemoan the flatness of global, moderate-acid wines, exclaiming they really could do with a little more freshness. As a wine-production region that gladly glugs all its own wines, our physical terroir has shaped the palate of what western Canadians enjoy. Besides, the crispness and purity of our wines is exactly what we like to drink with the clean, spiced flavours of our regional cuisine.
Vancouver, British Columbia’s largest city (of Winter Olympics fame), is the primary market for Okanagan Valley and other British Columbian wines. As a typical Canadian metropolis, the coastal Greater Vancouver area is very diverse: 46% of the population identifies as ethnically Asian, led by strong Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Korean and Japanese communities. Our local cuisine, therefore, is heavily influenced not only by the delicate nature of seafood, but also the impactful flavours of varied Asian umami and spice. In contrast to European sommelier recommendations to calm down hot foods with sweet wines, we prefer to throw gasoline on the fire, and pair spice with our local acidic wines.
Just as I finish planting the last baby vine in my garden, I hear Menbere’s voice calling musically from the house. We have lunch planned together, and she’s brought a box of sushi over to share. While Menbere heats up a cup of coffee in the microwave, I wash my hands, grab a cool bottle of tart local Riesling and a container of gochujang out of the fridge. It’s time to feel the burn.
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This article was originally published in Issue Three of FONDATA
