Strawberry jam with a hint of rough-as-guts
Inside the Debay Wine Cellar, Ba Na Hills, Sun World. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
It’s not a good sign when you finally reach your destination and your wife – instantly – turns to you and says, Sorry.
And then, three hours later, she turns to you again and says, You’re a good sport.
No offence intended but the place that we had spent those mostly-lost, eyes-agog three hours – called Sun World, in the Ba Na Hills behind Danang in Central Vietnam – isn’t exactly my cuppa. After all, Sun World doesn’t just call itself a theme park, but a fairy-themed one. And yet here’s the thing: in among all the weirdness of Sun World there was a small exhibit of great intrigue.
This exhibit was a wine cellar.
Full disclosure: when I first saw the street-sign, inside the Sun World theme park, pointing the way to the park’s Debay Wine Cellar, I said out loud: I can’t think of anything worse.
But then I thought: hang on. They have a wine cellar exhibit in a fairy park?
It’s worth noting that we’d been lured to this park for the most life-affirming of reasons: we wanted, my wife and I – sans kids – to go on a bloody long ride. This ride was not your usual theme park style of ride, but rather a cable car ride. We had heard that there was a cable car operating in the hills behind Danang, where we were staying, and that it was the world's longest non-stop single-track cable car. This cable car runs for a remarkable six kilometres, and travels over the top of “lush jungle”. It goes to the top of the Ba Na Hills, which means that it often travels through mist/and or clouds, to then land you at the otherwise-inaccessible fairy-park paradise above.
Bear in mind that this was Danang in high summer. The overnight temperatures were 28 degrees Celsius; the day-time temps 38 Celsius, and the ‘feels like’ temperature 48 Celsius. Who wouldn’t be gagging for a cable car trip up to a cool mountain top full of fairies?
Not that I knew about the fairies until I actually got to the park. Indeed – with our trademark naivety – my wife and I had genuinely thought that we could buy a ticket to the cable car, take the ride up the mountain, and head straight back down, sans fairies.
Hahahaha.
The ticket box, for starters, to the cable car/Sun World was five kilometres from the theme park itself. There’s no see before you buy. Even so, we stressed to our taxi driver that we didn’t want to go to Sun World, and that we only wanted to ride the cable car. This driver was ultra eager to please, so this request on our behalf made him so displeased that he pulled the car over to the side of the road and (via google translate on his phone) explained that this was not possible. Detecting our concern (aka incredulity) he finished this explanation with the translated words: I am old. You can rest assured. I am telling you the truth.
As of course he was. This meant though that once we’d been piled onto the world’s longest cable car and efficiently delivered, over the top of matted jungle, into the theme park proper that – courtesy of a layout that would make IKEA jealous – we were captives of this fairy domain for hours.
Sun World Cable Car, Ba Na Hills, Da Nang, Vietnam. Video: Campbell Mattinson.
I’m getting to the Debay Wine Cellar bit, don’t worry. I’m also getting to the wines that I tasted there, and then drank in full. But this cellar and any lesson that could possibly be derived from it can only really be gleaned in context.
The Sun World theme park is not about rides (other than the multiple cable cars) or activities. Sun World is mostly designed – I’m guessing – to present a series of instagrammable moments. At that, it excels, courtesy of flair, colour, movement, imagination and money – Russian and Vietnamese investors have put trillions into this place.
More or less the first thing you arrive at, straight off the cable, is an attraction called the Golden Bridge. On our visit, it was jam full of dressed-for-the-occasion people. To get an idea of the clothes some folk were wearing, my guess is that anyone selling white lace and long white socks in the Danang area is now driving a Rolls.
You don’t just walk around Sun World; you experience its various worlds and settings, which are coined as “recommendable sensations”. Sun World was the top tourism destination in Vietnam for four years running, from 2015, and is still going gangbusters. To give a small insight into the worlds on offer: there’s a faux Louvre, a faux Marseille, a faux French chateau, many references to Bordeaux, to a Le Jardin Flower Garden and to a French Village.
Part of Le Jardin Flower Garden at Sun World. Now that’s a sunflower dress. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
‘French Chateau’ at Sun World. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
‘French Chateau’ at Sun World. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
Mass of Cable Cars at Sun World, Ba Na Hills, Da Nang, Vietnam. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
But of course it’s the cellar that we’re interested in.
It’s called the Debay Wine Cellar. It’s carved into rock, into the side of Ba Na hill. It costs extra to take a walk through it, though this entry fee includes a glass of wine, served at the end.
I don’t know where to start now, and I didn’t know where to start then. In all honesty, as I walked through the Debay Wine Cellar and even after I’d left it, I thought that the whole thing was an affectation. I thought that it was faux. I thought that it was the strangest, weirdest, most out-of-place wine cellar I’d ever seen. A faux cellar, in a fairy world, in Vietnam, designed – I thought – as a place for people to take photos of themselves in.
There’s a theory in the world that the wine style of rosé has gained immensely in popularity over the past decade because, of all wine styles, its colour makes it the most Instagrammable. There’s another theory that many vineyards around the world are best described, or thought of, as ornamental; they promote the lifestyle, and provide the setting, as much as they do the wine that they grow. There’s yet another theory that life among certain key sectors of people is all about experiences, preferably Instagrammable experiences. The thing about experiences and all these theories is that you can’t Instagram the same experience over and over.
Uniqueness, and rarity, and difference, have a new value. If the uniqueness, or rarity, or difference can be photographed, then all the better.
The above notions ran through my mind as I got my head around this cellar stocked with faux wine barrels, its ‘bins’ racked with empty wine bottles, and then too as my wife pointed out that, of all the exhibits in this fairy world, this wine cellar was by far the least popular.
Which is why, suddenly, I became desperate for a drink. At the end of the walk through the cellar there were two red wines to choose from, and one chardonnay. The latter was from “south eastern Australia”, made by Berri Wine Estates. The first two were both from, according to the bottles, Bordeaux.
“We’re really going to do this?” I asked my wife.
“Why not?” she replied.
She’s such a wonderful human.
And so I stepped up to the first wine, not only full of hope, but intending to drink the bloody thing.
The first of these red wines though smelled and tasted of pure, thick, strawberry jam. I put it down and moved to the second. It was better, I guess, but rough as guts. There was an obvious solution: we sat down and poured both glasses into one blend. Between us, we then drank the combined lot. At the surrounding tables there were near-full wine glasses, all abandoned. The sweet jam of the first wine, I realised from the first sip of our new blend, had completely overwhelmed the impact of the second; it’s amazing how sweetness always wins. I’ve been writing tasting notes of wines for 30 years. In my mind I then wrote, Sweet strawberry jam with a hint of rough-as-guts.
This was never meant of course to be an exercise in quality and, dare I add, nor was it an exercise in taste. But it was meant to be memorable, and it sure was that.
This was meant to be my final thought: inside the Debay Wine Cellar there’s a carving of a man, stuck inside a wine barrel (photo below). This carving was, in a way, a representation of the world of wine: stuck inside its own walls, both elevated and incarcerated by its own history. Wine is often a cell with golden bars. The person depicted in this scene, though, looked pretty cool, which was apt too. I don’t know if our wooden friend makes it onto Instagram much though his fortunes will be better if he does. In the five minutes that we were in the room with him, there wasn’t a single other visitor in sight.
It was only later, after I’d left the park, that I discovered that the Debay Wine Cellar isn’t faux after all, and that it has an historic basis. It was built by the French in 1923, and was part of a small village on top the mountain. Of this village – which at its peak included a post office, a bank and a hospital – it’s pretty much the only thing to have survived the ravages of time, climate and war, courtesy of its dug-into-the mountain design.
And so my conclusion became this: I’d thought, while I was in this cellar, that I was witness to wine-out-of-time, consigned to the realm of the curio – and an unpopular one at that. But in a world of instagram fairies and pink chateau, I’d actually been witness to proof that, no matter what’s thrown at it, wine endures. Which is a good thing to remember.
Even if, three days later, I could still taste it.
The intrepid author/taster in the tasting area of the Debay Wine Cellar.
Debay Wine Cellar. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
