Kuei Hua Chen Chiew – Feng Shou – Chinese Happy Wine
Happy Wine – Dessert Wine
A wine lover is not satisfied with drinking the same wine every day, no matter how expensive and precious it is. Variety is the spice of life! I am a wine explorer, I like to sample products that are not main stream and that I never heard of, and sometimes you can find some unusual, surprising, and enjoyable wines… Kuei Hua Chen Chiew Feng Shou – Chinese Happy Wine. It is a dessert wine infused with the Osmanthus flowers. It is made from the indigenous Longyan grape variety grown in the Zhuolu County in China. It has an interesting light, bright orangy/pinkish colour. The nose is fragrant with sweet apricot, peach, and a hint of flowery Jasmine from the Osmanthus flowers with some minerally notes. On the palate, it offers a mix of sweet and bitterness mouthfeel, ripe dried apricot flavours with good acidity. It is simple, unique, enjoyable, and fun! Enjoy it chilled after the end of a nice meal. This wine is well-suited as an apéritif cocktail such as a ‘Happy Spritzer’. Recipe: fill a wine glass halfway with ice cubes, pour 3oz of Happy Wine and top-up with 4oz of soda water, et voilà!
SKU #897397 – $10.99 + tax – Available at BC Liquor stores and selected private stores.
Longyan Grape
It is a late ripening variety. Its firm pulps and steady stems mean that berries won’t fall off that easily during storage. Due to this reason, in ancient China, when the storage conditions of fresh fruits were not as satisfactory as today, Longyan was favoured by producers and consumers. Similar to Gewurztraminer, when Longyan grape matures, its skin turns a shade of red. The average weight of each berry is 7 to 8 grams (5 times heavier than that of Cabernet Sauvignon) with a good sugar and acid balance that gives Longyan grape a pleasant taste as a table grape. This variety is widely planted and easy to source, in 1979, China Great Wall Wine (which belongs to COFCO) chose Longyan to produce the very first dry wine in China, the ‘Great Wall Dry White’. The wine was produced in Huailai, Hebei Province, which is an important producing region for the grape. Excerpt from China Decanter emag. For more information visit ChinaDecanterMag page.
China has emerged on to the global wine scene with unprecedented speed in recent years, both in terms of production and consumption. Currently, it is one of the top 10 wine-producing countries in the world, both in terms of area under vine and of volume produced. It is a good time to explore and discover the wide range of Chinese alcoholic beverages.
Cheers!
