The Best American Travel Writing 2015 (36 page)

The hours passed. During a weekend, the clubbers come and go, as if to a tidal rhythm. A friend had likened the scene to a coral reef: various schools of multicolored fish, stubborn crustaceans, the occasional ray or eel gliding by, swimming in an ocean of techno. In the eddies, there were people who, though all but motionless, seemed caught up in something intense—you could see it in their eyes. “You are touched by the different frequencies,” the DJ Ricardo Villalobos says in
Feiern
. “You start to think about your childhood.” Transcendence and transgression lurked just out of sight.

At one point, I went up to Panorama Bar, where a DJ from Windsor, Ontario, was playing a set of Chicago house and Detroit techno. Her name was Heidi—Heidi Van den Amstel. She had curly peroxided hair, a white T-shirt, tattoos on her arms, and leather pants. She'd arrived from London shortly before her set, amid flight delays across Europe—an entire continent of revelers vexed by a disruption to the techno supply chain. She was part of the generation of Windsorites who'd fallen hard for the dance music across the river, in Detroit. She moved to Europe a dozen years ago, living in London and Berlin. This was the first time she had played Panorama Bar in almost four years. She had been nervous, but now she was in the thick of it, dancing and tossing her hair as she worked the mixing console. She flipped through a binder of CDs and manipulated knobs, her pinkie out, as though she were drinking tea. Her agent brought her a shot of tequila, which she chased with a lemon wedge, and she shuddered. A voice in the music intoned, as though from a
Zeitmaschine
, “Can you feel it acid house acid house I was there.” People were jammed up in front of her dancing, some with Avalon Ballroom abandon. “I want you, I need you.” This was fun music, joyous music, not the austere minimal techno of downstairs, or the jazzy techno of Jonson and Minilogue, or the hardcore techno that would inspire one to press the dwarf. The bass rattled the empty tin record bins behind the DJ. I sent a text to the boar hunter, wondering if he was around. He replied, “KitKatClub.”

After a few hours, Heidi stretched her back and leaned into the climax of her set. Downstairs, the techno—and the crowd—had turned hard. Upstairs, the dingy gray light of another Baltic morning leaked past the edges of the louvered shutters at the windows. Soon the shades would flash open in synch with the music, to astonish the congregation with the insult of daylight.

Two DJs who go by the name Bicep took over. Heidi checked her face in her compact, gave herself over to the adulation of the dancers down in front, and then, after a moment, made her way to the bar with her boyfriend and her agent. I joined them for tequila shots and beers. Breakfast in Berlin. This went on for a while. Heidi had had a marvelous time—too much for words, really—but she didn't want to talk about Berghain. She was afraid that if she did, she'd never get to play there again.

TONY PERROTTET

FROM
The Wall Street Journal Magazine

O
N A RARE
clear day, Grace Vineyard, 310 miles southwest of Beijing, might be mistaken for a winery in Tuscany. The balcony of the Italianate mansion overlooks lush rows of grapevines stretching to the horizon, where low mountains hover in the haze. Picnic tables sit scattered in a garden beneath slender trees that rustle in the dry wind. But take a stroll outside the winery gates, and you instantly step into the heart of provincial China. The unpaved lanes lead to farming villages whose crumbling facades are daubed with old Communist Party slogans and hung with tattered red flags. The motorbikes rattling past are beaten-up relics from Mao's day; the grape pickers moving through the fields wear traditional broad peasant hats. Beyond them sit the half-forgotten byways of Shanxi Province, a region renowned in the Imperial era as a center of trade and banking but more notorious in recent decades for its polluted cities devoted to the coal industry. Only a short drive away lie remnants of China's ancient glory, such as the enormous Chang Family Manor, once the luxurious abode of tea merchants, its interior lined with exquisitely carved wood.

Grace Vineyard is focused more on China's future. In the elegant dining room adorned with contemporary artwork, a small army of servers glides around me. While the kitchen prepares a banquet of delectable Shanxi treats, including scissor-cut noodles, sautéed river fish, and fried
bing
pastries, a fastidious wine steward creeps up at regular intervals to refill my glass with Grace's flagship Cabernet blend, the rich and velvety 2008 Chairman's Reserve, rated 85 by Robert Parker's website for its subtle blackberry flavors and hints of bay leaf, pepper, and cedar.

Grace is at the forefront of one of China's more improbable trends, as the most successful of a new wave of boutique wineries. Most have cropped up in the dry terrain of Ningxia in the north. But winemakers are also venturing into China's more varied landscapes, laying vines from the deserts of the old Silk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. There are now around 400 wineries in the country. Wine consultants from France, Greece, California, and Australia are becoming as common as foreign IT experts in Shanghai, and the local product is being marketed not only to expats but to an increasingly sophisticated Chinese clientele.

The results are beginning to startle critics. In 2011, the Cabernet blend Jia Bei Lan, from the Helan Quingxue vineyard, became the first Chinese wine to take the prestigious international trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards (judges praised its “supple, graceful and ripe” flavors and its “excellent length and four-square tannins”), and in 2011, four Chinese reds, led by Grace's Chairman's Reserve, beat French Bordeaux in a blind taste test in Beijing with international judges. Although some cried foul—wines had to be under $100, including the 48 percent mainland tax on imported wines—more vocal Chinese patriots hailed the result as heralding the arrival of an industry, evoking the famous blind tasting in 1976 when California wines outshone the Gauls for the first time.

As they advance, China's boutique-wine pioneers may also help upend one of the many myths about the country. The conventional wisdom—or cliché—is that China can reproduce Western manufacturing or technology overnight, but European artisanal culinary delicacies that have evolved over generations are all but impossible to replicate. And yet, even apart from wine, there are dozens of small producers in China who are now attempting to do just that, with surprising success. Truffles, burrata cheese, prosciutto, feta, Roquefort, baguettes, foie gras—almost every Western gourmet item has been tackled by Chinese entrepreneurs for a new audience of adventurous diners. The Temple Restaurant Beijing, a contemporary enclave that is part of a 600-year-old temple near the Forbidden City, offers excellent French-style cheeses crafted by Le Fromager de Pekin, founded by a local producer named Liu Yang. His specialties include Beijing Blue and Beijing Gray, whose consistency falls between a Camembert and Saint Marcellin. At Sir Elly's Restaurant at the five-star Peninsula Shanghai, if you order the selection of caviars, three will be Chinese. For a decade already, a Chinese caviar industry in the rivers bordering Russia has been winning accolades and is exporting to the U.S. and Europe.

The main hurdle is convincing consumers to give Chinese products a chance—a problem that is particularly acute with wine. An affinity for grape wine seems culturally far removed from the Middle Kingdom. For some 4,000 years, the Chinese have preferred grain-based wine (typically rice), a dark, fortified brew that often resembles dry sherry. (It became a state monopoly under the ancient Tang dynasty, when the government ran taverns that doubled as brothels, featuring female musicians outside to lure customers.) And like many uninformed outsiders, when I was first offered a glass of Chinese grape wine in Shanghai's spectacular restaurant M on the Bund, I thought it was a practical joke. The idea tends to provoke remarks about toxic side effects—losing taste buds, for example, or even the sight in one eye. “Five years ago, you might have been right,” the owner, Michelle Garnaut, says, handing me a glass of Grace's 2010 Chardonnay as we stand on the balcony facing the skyscrapers of Pudong. The first sip is a surprise—crisp and bright, with subtle nectarine flavors.

In fact, grape wine was first grown commercially in China in 1892, using vines imported from California, when it was marketed to foreign residents and the first rising class of Westernized Chinese. It was a strong beginning: in 1915, the winery, Changyu, won a string of gold medals at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and in the wild and decadent 1930s, sultry movie star Hu Die (“the Chinese Marilyn Monroe”) promoted it in Shanghai. After a long period of stagnation following the Communist Revolution, production of wine began expanding after the country's embrace of capitalism in the 1980s. According to Vinexpo, an international wine and spirits trade group, China is now the world's eighth largest wine producer and will be the sixth largest by 2016, surpassing Australia and Chile. But the emphasis has long been on quantity rather than quality, with enormous state-owned companies like Great Wall and Dynasty churning out cheap wines for locals with industrial speed, often using grapes imported from Argentina and South Africa.

For a glimpse of an old-school winery, I make the pilgrimage one drizzly afternoon to Chateau Changyu AFIP, located in a rural district an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Beijing. It's the descendant of China's pioneer 1892 company and now part of a conglomerate whose scale can only send a shudder down the spine of the average oenophile. The winery isn't hard to spot, since it boasts a reproduction French chateau, its turrets rising above the verdant vineyards. The sense of Disney fantasy only increases as I enter part of the winery complex called Foreign Town, a faux European village complete with medieval church, a store where Chinese newlyweds are having their photos printed on wine labels, and a shop mysteriously called the Holy Grail Factory—all utterly deserted but awaiting busloads of tourists.

Accompanying me is the Beijing-based wine blogger Jim Boyce, who has covered the local wine industry for more than eight years and has been a consistent advocate for the boutique wines of Shanxi and Ningxia. Boyce, who has the slightly disheveled appearance and acerbic wit of Newman from
Seinfeld
, is having trouble readjusting his palate to China's pollution after a trip to the bucolic Sonoma Valley. For days after his return to Beijing, he jokes, the bouquet of every wine, good or bad, was vaguely like smog, the first sip rather like lead. (“And the hangovers are worse here,” he mourns.)

A guide named Nan Xia leads us into the château to inspect the bunkerlike cellar, where private wine collections are stored behind Arthurian coats of arms inscribed with Chinese calligraphy, and a Wine Culture Museum, which includes a photo of Changyu wines being served to President Obama at a state dinner. (“The closest thing to an assassination attempt yet,” Boyce murmurs.) The tour ends up in a cavernous tasting room, where a young sommelier, Wong Fuyue, hesitantly serves a 2008 Chardonnay at room temperature to the Muzak version of the
Titanic
theme song. “I would describe this wine as anemic,” Boyce notes. “There's not much nose. But at least it's clean.” When told that it sells for more than $100 a bottle, Boyce almost drops his glass. “I can buy a Chilean bottle for $12 at the supermarket—and it's better! Why would I buy this wine?”

Wong Fuyue grins and turns up his palms. “I don't know!” Nan Xia is unperturbed by the bad review. “Can we all take a photo together?”

After visiting Changyu, it is easy to understand why the arrival of smaller producers causes such relief and excitement among China's wine lovers. Some experts believe that the sheer novelty of the situation is leading to overenthusiasm. “A few years ago, Chinese wine was terrible,” Boyce says. “Now it's not. But the industry is still in its infancy,” he cautions.

The boutique wines are expensive—thanks to their small-scale production and China's high transport costs—retailing from $40 to $80. And production in some vineyards is minuscule. But the quality of the boutique wines is now undeniable—the country has the soil, the climate, and an aptitude for the technical aspects of production—and the range of domestic wines is expanding, like so much in China, at an accelerating pace.

The rise of boutique wineries is just one element turning the wine world on its head; another is the recent boom in international wine imports to China. At the luxury end of the market, the shifting tastes of China's superwealthy are now dictating prices at auction houses around the world. Hong Kong led the way, abolishing the tax on imported wine in 2008 and becoming the world's No. 1 wine auction market by 2011. “People say it's a miracle, but it's not,” says Gregory De'eb, general manager of Crown Wine Cellars, a fine-wine storage facility housed in a World War II ammunition depot leased from the Hong Kong government. For decades, Hong Kong's wealthy had been storing their wines in cellars overseas. “In 2008, the floodgates opened,” De'eb says. “There was forty years' worth of wine knowledge, forty years' worth of stocks, and a huge amount of capital. All the building blocks were in place.”

This wine expertise is now percolating through the mainland. “China started late, but it's catching up quickly,” says Simon Tam, head of wine at Christie's in China. “In just a few years, people have reached a very high level of appreciation. Chinese clients used to talk only about prices and vintages, not what was in the bottle. Now the important thing is not how much money you have but how you express it in wine knowledge.” Tim Weiland, former general manager of the exclusive Aman at Summer Palace in the emperor's onetime retreat in Beijing, suggests that the image of China's wealthy class as crass nouveau riche—mixing expensive Bordeaux with Coca-Cola, for example—is entirely out of date. “The nouveaux riches of ten years ago are now the old rich,” he says. “They have homes in Switzerland and Aspen, they're incredibly sophisticated and well traveled—much more well traveled than I am—and they know their wines.”