If you're wondering where to start with Asian wines—and which are any good—we're letting you know the wines to drink now from China, Japan, India, Thailand and Kazakhstan
Long gone are the days when the words “Asian wine” would leave most drinkers scratching their heads. Still, though strides have been made, most discussions of the continent’s grape-based wines usually circle back to the inevitable question “but are they any good?” Happily, these days I’m able to confidently answer “yes,” before I append the qualifier “some of them.”
See also: Perfect Pairings: The Best Wines To Match With Asian Food
Beyond the novelty factor, there are indeed a handful of Asian wines that clearly express the cultures and environments of their origins and are well worth seeking out. However, one can’t yet approach Asian wine with the same confidence one might exhibit in, say, a French supermarket wine aisle. Beyond the question of quality, there’s the issue of comparative value. Chinese wines in particular often come saddled with price tags that would make your Carrefour shopper’s eyes bulge from her head (blame the agonisingly high cost of burying vines every winter in many Chinese regions, plus a healthy dose of vanity pricing in some cases).
There’s also a vast range of ambition among Asian producers. Some in Japan and China have explicitly set their sights on the luxury wine market while many in the rest of the continent (especially markets with high alcohol import taxes like Thailand and India) are content to furnish domestic markets with quaffable everyday options. However, between the over-egged and the indifferent, there is a lot of interesting ground to explore: