At the Hong Kong International Wine & Spirits Fair in November I was able to sample a few of Thailand's new wine releases, with notes on my recommended wines to follow.  These new offerings were mainly 2008 reds and 2009 whites / roses.

Earlier this year I released a report on winemaking in Thailand.  With the country so new to the production of quality wines, each year is a learning curve and an opportunity to adapt and improve.  Producing wine grapes in marginal climates like Thailand's tropical viticultural regions is a new frontier.  The production of palatable wine there is largely made possible by modern techniques such as the development of trellising methods and canopy management that can ameliorate the less desirable effects of climate and this area continues to be an important work in progress.

I was sent some 2008 / 2009 harvest reports by the Thai Winery Association but found them of little use.  They basically state that everything was hunky-dory during the vintages.  The problem is that barring extreme conditions such as torrential rains, widespread rot, drought, etc., the key to understanding the significance of such annual reports is to have a library of previous vintage conditions and subsequent wine characteristics to which to compare them.  Because of that work-in-progress issue that I mentioned earlier, this library doesn't really exist yet in Thailand.

Therefore I can only compare 2008 / 2009 to the previous vintages that I tasted.  Generally speaking, the 2009 white wines had just slightly less intensity and concentration than the 2008s.  The quality of reds continues to lag behind the whites.  There seems to be a struggle to get the tannins fully ripe in the reds and many of the wines have that rather unpleasant, foxy, hybrid character.  I was however impressed by the Pirom Khao Reserve PB Valley Tempranillo 2008 (Siam Winery) – a wine giving a pleasant purity of red berry flavours and gentler tannins.  Wines like this Tempranillo are very encouraging, proving that the potential for the future continual improvement of Thai quality wine production is clearly bright!