WITH TONY LOVE

It’s all about China this weekend.

There’ll be dragon dances, Year of the Dog celebrations, banquets, yum cha and dumplings all over the place, and all the usual hand-wringing about what drinks go best with Chinese food.

Our wine industry leaders will answer that with an ever hopeful and selfcongratulatory “Australian wine”, of course, given that China is our biggest export market in value terms, making up a third of all Australia’s exports in dollar terms.

That adds up to $848 million into mainland China, and if you add Hong Kong to that, clock up an extra $118 million, the vast majority of that being red wine. The national data doesn’t break down the varietal preferences in those markets, but globally the order of popularity is shiraz, cabernet sauvignon, shiraz/cabernet blends, chardonnay and merlot as the top five.

The flip side of this is a very different story. I’ve had the displeasure of tasting just a small few imported Chinese-made wines over the years, and I have not been convinced.

But a couple of newcomers have arrived this year on to the shelves at a limited number of large liquor stores (and via online sales) and they have upped the impression of a much-improved world of Chinese wine culture.

Both wines are cabernet sauvignon blends with merlot in different proportions from the Ningxia region in mainland China’s central north, and more specifically the Helan Mountains sub-region. The winemaker is a colourful woman, Wang Fang, known apparently as “Crazy Fang” for her innovative winemaking and pion pioneering spirit transferred to her homeland h after a decade in the business b in Germany.

C Crazy it may seem, but her two wines under the Kanaan Win Winery label that we can now buy here are terrific cabernet blends b in traditional, fullbodied b styles, something we’ve come to learn China’s serious wine drinkers love from France and Australia.

The Kanaan Winery 2012 Black Beauty ($129) is a 70/30 cabernet merlot that’s spent ent two years in new French ch oak barrels els that impart art their influence on the wine e and perhaps limit more vibrant fruit characters, though it’s big, rich and soft with deliciously fine tannins.

Better still is the Kanaan Winery 2013 Pretty Pony ($59), a 90/10 proportioned blend d that highlights not just the e darker fruits but more nuanced oak notes and secondary characters of coffee and dark chocolate e along with soft, plush and minerally tannins.