Tasting ‘presidential’ wine and 2 ‘warriors’ worth sipping

Question: What makes an imported wine sell out in China in one hour?

Answer: Announcing the state dinner menu at Mar-aLago, when President Xi Jinping visited his US counterpart in Florida last month.

The bottle in question was Girard Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, which retails for around 800 yuan ($116) in China.

Evo, the wine’s distributor in China based in Shanghai and Hong Kong, is now in the process of restocking the brand. VIP members of Morton’s of Chicago steakhouse in Beijing recently got to taste the cabernet sauvignon, which Evo says is the top-selling wine at President Donald Trump’s resort. At the dinner Trump hosted for President Xi and Madame Peng Liyuan, the Girard was paired with a dryaged prime New York strip steak.

••• Silver Heights, one of several terrific wineries in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, has introduced an “entry-level” wine brand, The Last Warrior, with a white blend and a red blend each priced at 158 yuan, about half the cost of its popular Family Reserve label.

The white, an easy-to-drink blend of almost equal parts of chardonnay, riesling and sauvignon blanc, is touted as having “an array of tropical fruit aromas with a crisp, dry and refreshing acidity”. Drinking it outside recently on a warm afternoon, we found the nose and palate of this wine changed a good bit as we drank.

The red is a 60-40 blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot that has a bit more oomph than the white: The nose is all dark berry and earthy. We found it to be a good match with roast duck, and suspect it would pair with a steak just as nicely.

••• Hong Kong master of wine Debra Meiburg says her MWM Wine School, “a longtime dream”, will launch on May 26. The Wine & Spirit Education Trust-approved program provider will be located in Hong Kong’s hot Wong Chuk Hang area. Meiburg promises “dynamo teachers, a fully-customized curriculum of fun, inspiring and interactive learning experiences.”

••• Industry leaders from across the Chinese wine and spirits industry gathered in Hong Kong recently to discuss the role of language and brand awareness in the rise of the Chinese wine and spirits sector. At the event, led by the Wine & Spirit Education Trust for its alumni, a key difficulty identified by all panelists was the complication with translating brand names and specific phrasing.

Hong Kong-based master of wine Jeannie Cho Lee (right) commented: “I have about 20,000 wine notes that are translated into Chinese so I face this difficulty every day. The question is are you taking the name that’s registered by the importer, are you taking the name that’s being used by the local media, are you taking the northern Chinese version of that name or are you catering to the whole province? The translation is a huge issue and I think the only way to really solve that in my mind is always to have the original name in parenthesis in English next to it if you have any doubt. Wine description is about nuance and about being able to relate in a cultural way, and so if you take something literally it actually doesn’t translate, so you have to be slightly poetic in the way you translate. Names in Chinese don’t go more than three syllables and yet you have these place names and producers that are 10 characters long because they are translated phonetically and it doesn’t make sense.”