Dragon’s Hollow Chinese Wines « My Wine Education

Dragon’s Hollow Chinese Wines

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I’ve been searching for these notes for months and today I found them in the back of my mileage book. It’s not normally where I stuff wine notes.

Back in July, JP at Party Town did a tasting on Chinese wines. I took a few notes, thinking "Oh! I can do an Olympics post!" Since I promptly misplaced the notes, that didn’t happen. But, I can just do a quick post letting you know about the Chinese wines that JP had us try.

Dragon’s Hollow Winery is located at the eastern foot of the He Lan Mountain range in Ningxia Hui. Interestingly, the vines were planted in the early ’90s, but the vineyard was started in 2003. Similar, I suspect, to the desert area of La Mancha in Spain, this area of China was recently a barren desert until some enterprising, grape-growing farmers came along. Back in 618 AD or so, this was a popular grape-growing region. The farmers are just working hard to bring back the ancient heritage of the land.

Kevin and I weren’t thrilled with the wines we tried, as they tasted too "new." However we’re still thrilled to have tried them. We think it’s cool whenever a new region jumps into the wine game. So congratulations to Dragon’s Hollow and we look forward to trying them again in a few years.

Dragon’s Hollow Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005: The nose on this wine was of, um, twigs. Kevin and I found this to be too vegetal and green as well, with a lot of green pepper and not much fruit.
Kevin’s score: My score:

Dragon’s Hollow Unoaked Chardonnay, 2005: This chardonnay was so buttery I thought it tasted like popcorn without the salt. And although it was unoaked, it was still very smoky. Everyone tasting the wine at the time seemed to chalk this up to the addition of oak chips. (By the way, you don’t want oak chips added to your wine.)
Our score:

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Posted by Michelle at 9:06 am in Tastings | Permalink | Comments (1)

One Response to “Dragon’s Hollow Chinese Wines”

Andrew says:

April 29, 2010 at 2:21 am

Hello? You don’t want oak chips added to your wine?? You can pretty much bet that every wine (definitely Chardonnay and Cabernet) that is less than $20 dollars has used oak chips, seeds, or beans in it. Or they would cost a hell of a lot more. And many many wines are made excellent this way – but you don’t call them unoaked if they have been oaked. So I don’t know what they’re doing – I haven’t tasted it but I did like your review w/ the popcorn reference.