TALES OF THE VINE

The Semillon grape is my favorite wine grape to taste on the vine. Fat, golden yellow in color, juicy and mellow, they are almost addictive and it is so easy to just keep popping them in your mouth as you walk down the vine row of a vineyard.

Semillon grapes are grown all over the world yet are one of those oddities you never really notice. Typically blended away to Sauvignon blanc or Chardonnay, Semillon never wins any Best Grape awards but always seems to garner Best Supporting grape.

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Are you someone who buys a wine for its taste or to gain face? In other words do you buy wines you like regardless of what others think of them or do you instead find yourself influenced to purchase wines because of what others say?

Most of us would probably say we are individualists belonging to the former category, but I wonder.

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In the past, rosé was the Rodney Dangerfield of wines; it never got any respect. As recently as a year ago I could not even give away rosé wine. But this year the tables have changed and rosé is the hottest wine style globally; people cannot seem get enough of the pink stuff and it is especially popular here in Phuket. Even the famous Twinpalms Hotel has acknowledge Phuket’s pink obsession with their recent anniversary pink theme party featuring a slew of rosé wines to celebrate the occasion.

There are several reasons to explain why rosé wine’s sudden soaring popularity has happened only now. First and foremost is price. Rosé wine is cheap in comparison to the rising prices of other wines and people seem to be more cautious with their cash in the present economic environment than in the past few years.

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Wine has been around a long time in Asia but sometimes we are still confused about which wines to enjoy with Asian Food. Luckily, here in Thailand the art of balancing sweet, salty, sour and bitter flavor sensations in wine and richly flavored Thai cuisine is as effortless as wine itself.

There are only five flavors we human beings can perceive; salty, sweet, sour, bitter and savory. That’s it; there are only five tastes and it does not matter if the food is Thai, Russian Italian or Greek ? the rules for matching wine and food are the same whether the food is from east or west.

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