Editorial: Bay wine rare find in China

Wine bars and boutique vino stores weren't rare in China.

But Bay wine, in stark contrast, was immensely tough to find.

A sub-plot to scoffing as much street food as I could was to track how long it took me to find my first bottle of Hawke's Bay wine in the People's Republic.

So, without a doubt, the most common question I asked in China was "Can I see your wine list?"

Most wine merchants seemed to have not the slightest grasp of English. Many looked at me blankly, apologetically.

Using Mandarin for New Zealand "Xin xi lan" (roughly pronounced "shin see-lan"), only made me more frustrated. Shop and bar owners would point to a few found bottles excitedly, where upon inspection I found they were indeed from Xin xi lan, but were of the ubiquitous Marlborough sauvignon plonk variety.

Almost every wine joint I visited had divided their boutique premises into three sections: French, Italian and, wait for it, Australian.

Now, I can understand the preference for old world wines of Italian and French provenance. But the third category had me confused.

Is the Aussie product superior to ours? Given every time I quaff vino from across the Tasman only to wonder why, I doubt it. I was left wondering if, in fact, it's simply that their marketing's of a better vintage.

During six days in China I spied but two bottles from Hawke's Bay.

The first, in a Shangri-la moment, was a 2008 CJ Pask cabernet-merlot-malbec. Okay, so this wasn't spied on a wine list, or a boutique liquor store, rather, a souvenir shop.

As fate would have it, it sat on a shelf just below a David Trubridge-designed lightshade. It wasn't without a sense of pride I picked up both products for a better look; a little piece of bottled Hastings and an unmistakable design from Whakatu. After days of fruitless searching for a Bay product I found two in a tiny souvenir shop in downtown Shanghai.

Days later, tucking into the best Peking duck in Beijing, I again asked for the wine list. And there it was: Sacred Hill chardonnay.

My only disappointment was we'd already purchased a few bottles of red to match the duck. And besides, it was priced at 468 Chinese yuan, the equivalent of $90. An impressive mark-up from the $22-odd it's sold at here.

Good for them.

I retrieved my camera to take a shot of the wine list but was quickly prevented from doing so by restaurant management. Their wine list was top secret.

I mention this only because of today's wine story on page 3 where, speaking on China's growing wine market, Mission Estate Wines' Simon Nash says even a minuscule growth there would be huge for us.

Here's hoping this comes to fruition and that Hawke's Bay wine will one day boast a bigger volume in the People's Republic.

To Sacred Hill and CJ Pask, congratulations. Love your work.