Despite 2000 years of struggle to u

Despite 2000 years of struggle to unify the country's various peoples -- from Emperor Qin's forming of the Dynastic period to Mao's forcing of the Cultural Revolution -- there still is great division on one of the most important topics -- wine. Ordering a glass of wine in this country is akin to Russian roulette with a .45 pointed at your taste buds. Depending on what region you are visiting and the ethnicity of the server you are ordering from you might get variations from a clear moonshine-like liquor to a cloyingly sweet grape-based wine beverage.

It took us a while to straighten out exactly what we'd get when ordering. In most tourist-frequented restaurants the menu breaks down the wines into 'rice', 'dry' and 'sweet' and even 'liquor'. We assumed that dry and sweet were referring to grape-based wines. The Chinese have had a sweet tooth with grape wines -- lumping the grape in with other fruit wines and producing them in a similar style. Only in the last two decades have more western-style dry wines entered the market en mass with plantings of cabernet, merlot, and syrah produced with the help of foreign winemakers. Its now poised to be the largest market for 'wine' in the world - but that's another post.