Hardly a day goes by without a headline about the frenzied wine market in Asia, particularly China. This week, Wine Enthusiast Magazine announced that it will produce a Mandarin edition for circulation to 100,000 “Chinese VIP consumers.” France’s Federation of Wine and Spirits Exporters announced a 29 percent increase in shipments to Asia last year with a value of $3.3 billion. And in the city of Bordeaux, a négociant that specializes in Bordeaux sales to China and is staffed by seven Mandarin-speaking employees, opened a street-level shop to increase its visibility to the growing number of Chinese buyers coming to town, according to Decanter.com.

Indeed, the red-hot Chinese market for all levels of Bordeaux shows no sign of cooling. But what you hear almost nothing about is the Chinese and Burgundy. I had the chance to discuss this last week with Vincent Avenel, export manger of Domaine Faiveley, one of Burgundy’s biggest and best-known producers, at a dinner featuring some top new releases from Frederick Wildman and Sons, the New York importer that has been bring wines from the region to the United States since the 1930s. When I asked him whether the Chinese were taking to Burgundy the way they had to Bordeaux, his answer was quick and emphatic: “Not at all.”

In fact, China accounts for just 1.5 percent of Faiveley’s exports, Avenel told me. This surprised me as we tasted some top Burgundies, among them Faiveley’s 2009 Gevrey-Chambertin 1er Cru “Les Cazetiers” and Alain Burguet’s 2009 Chambertin Grand Cru “Clos de Beze.” Don’t wines like this qualify as the kind of luxury items the Chinese are embracing? What followed was a fascinating and candid conversation about money, taste, and sophistication.

For the Chinese at the moment, Avenel said, the hot wines are from Bordeaux and Australia because they are “bombs in a glass” and more easily understood and embraced than Burgundy. “We all started with Bordeaux,” he said, “because it’s the entry-level thing. The U.S. started with Bordeaux. The Japanese started with Bordeaux.” He said that Burgundy, on the other hand, “is never love at first sight. You need to build some maturity in terms of taste.”

He continued: “Burgundy is not about power. It’s about charm and secret things. You need to improve your ability to taste subtle things.” How long does it take? “It’s not something you get in just a couple of years,” he said. “I think it takes 10 to 15 years.” His conclusion: for all its newly minted wealth, China is simply not yet ready for Burgundy. “What we notice,” he said, “is that very often Burgundy is about old money and that Bordeaux is about nouveaux riches.”

Jeff Fielder

Bands: Mark Lanegan, Lindsay Fuller, Sera Cahoone

Bar: Ocho

History: "My Drink is the Widower, inspired by the band and the music of Kevin Large (a Seattleite now residing in Portland). Just like him, it's classic, slightly bitter, and good lookin'."

Drink: The Widower

1 ½ oz. rye

½ oz. yellow Chartreuse

½ oz. Gran Classico Bitter

½ oz. grapefruit juice

Dash of Angostura aromatic bitters

Dash of grapefruit bitters

Garnish with a brandied cherry.

Drew Church

Bands: Mark Pickerel and His Praying Hands, the Cops, the Basements, Little Cuts, Puberty

Bar: Hazlewood

History: "I thought of Davidson Hart Kingsbery because over the last year I think I've seen them play about 20 times. And they rule. And they are awesome dudes. But they are a country band, so the drink has to have whiskey in it. Also, due to the fact that they are a country band, the drink had to be a little bit bitter and a little bit sweet."

Drink: Davidson Hart Kingsbery

1 ½ oz. rye

¾ oz. green Chartreuse

¾ oz. lemon juice

¾ oz. Punt e Mes

Garnish with grapefruit twist.

*****

Boys Town cocktail

11/2 ounces Knob Creek rye

1/4 ounce Green Chartreuse

1/2 ounce Château Montifaud Pineau des Charentes

1/2 ounce Luxardo bitter liqueur

Start with a respected Burgundian producer who has the ability to select from some of the finest parcels in two of the most prestigious communes for chardonnay in all of Burgundy, the homeland of chardonnay.

Blend and mature those parcels to precise and exacting standards---what the Burgundians call élevage, elevating or lifting up the wine--- and release it at a remarkably low price.

That’s a formula for success.

That’s what Olivier Leflaive does with the Les Setilles Bourgogne Blanc 2009.  It’s rare when you find a wine of this quality sporting the humble and unassuming “Bourgogne Blanc” moniker.  That’s usually seen on more modest, and, well, unassuming wines.

Although the names of Puligny-Montrachet and Meursault, two bastions of Premier Cru and Grand Cru chardonnays, don’t appear on the label, chardonnay from those two are what is inside the bottle.

Leflaive carefully selects from the two communes to achieve roughly a 70% Puligny-Montracher/30% Meursault balance, with Meursault contributing the plump roundness and Puligny-Montrachet the mineral austerity to the pairing.

Leflaive further shows its wisdom by using carefully restrained oak influence in the Les Setilles: this is a chardonnay where the fruit is allowed---encouraged, enabled---to shine through clearly and boldly, with only the lightest hint of vanilla oak to enhance the wine.

Remarkably floral in the nose, fresh and bright, with squirts of lemon zest, this is an enticing chardonnay from start to pleasant finish.  The true signal of quiet quality, though, comes through after the taste, when you realize that you’re no longer looking at the elements of the wine, but appreciating the wine for what it is in total.  And that’s because the elements come together so seamlessly, in such poised balance, that you stop noticing the details and simply enjoy the wine.

As a final grace note, Leflaive prices the Les Setilles at a very reasonable price, so you can enjoy more of it.  It is Leflaive’s best-selling chardonnay offering, and it’s a steal.  And a shame that more people don’t know about it.

I confessed to a secret fascination with wine maps here a couple of months ago. At the conclusion of the post "In love with wine maps?" I noted that it seemed long past time for some one to stir a database of vineyard information and some other technology into a pot of  Google Earth and provide us with interactive, 3D maps of the world's wine regions we could readily access online.

The project seemed to me to be a perfect fit for an imprint like Mitchell-Beazley which specializes in wine-related titles, or Dorling-Kindersley, as an online extension of its "Eyewitness Companions" series, perhaps.

So I was a little suprised to hear from the people at Frederick Wildman and Sons, a national importer and wholesaler of fine wines, who told me they were about to launch a series of Google Earth-powered vineyard tours/tutorials, accessible to the public via their website. 

The "Terroir-Genome Project" as they call it currently consists of tours of regional vineyards in Spain, Italy, France, and Argentina.  

The very brief promo video below gives you some idea what you can expect, though in it the camera moves very quickly and there is no voiceover . . .

The complete videos proceed at a more stately pace and mix some atmosphere-inducing (though occasionally distracting) music with the voices of winemakers describing the location, extent, history, and character of the vineyards you seem to helicopter over. Hitting pause allows you to manipulate the image as you would in Google Earth - panning, zooming, tilting, and scrolling across the scene. There are also places where you can pick up 360 degree ground-level views, although these don't appear everywhere and can be hard to find (you have to look for a little orange figure at the right and drag him into the window).  Though unvoiced, the tour of the Valtellina in the foothills of the Italian Alps is quite spectacular. 

At this point the thing is a little buggy and if you're not familiar with Google Earth, a bit tricky to operate. After a few frustrating minutes you'll learn that unlike a simple video file, each program here has to be loaded before it it can play and that it's best to shut off the feature that reproduces the shift from night to day.

A minor drawback: since the project is designed to promote the Wildman portfolio the focus of each video is limited to properties the company represents.  But there's an awful lot to be learned from visiting the vineyards this way -- and honestly, the T-G Project is a grand start.  

The Wildman people assure me more tours will hit the site in the next week or so.