Strawberry jam with a hint of rough-as-guts
Inside the Dubay 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 let’s just say that the place that we had spent those mostly-lost, aimless, eyes-agog three hours – called Sun World, in the Ba Na Hills behind Danang in Central Vietnam – wasn’t generally my cuppa tea. It calls itself a theme park after all, and a kitschy one at that. 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 faux 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 theme 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 ride. Not a theme park style of ride, but a cable car ride. We had heard that there was a cable car operating in the hills behind Da Nang, where we were staying. This wasn’t just any old cable car, although all cable cars are great, so far as I’m concerned. But this cable car was, or is, the world's longest non-stop single-track cable car. It runs for nearly six kilometres. It goes 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 theme-park paradise above.
This was Da Nang in early August. The overnight temperatures were 28 degrees Celsius; the day-time temps 38 Celsius, and the ‘feels like’ temperature 48 Celsius. Getting up into the mountain top semi-coolness was an attraction in itself.
The thing about my wife and I is that we are both steadfastly naive. We assume nothing, and hope for the best in people. We genuinely thought that we could buy a ticket to the cable car, take the ride up the mountain and back, and head off.
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, so that he could properly explain (via google translate on his phone) 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 that shortly after we piled onto the world’s longest cable car and were delivered into the heart of a theme park that we had no desire to enter.
Sun World Cable Car, Ba Na Hills, Da Nang, Vietnam. This is phone footage from the way back down. 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.
I’m going to run through this very quickly and, before I do, admit that I/we didn’t get around to see everything at Sun World. This theme park though is not really about rides (other than the multiple cable cars) or activities. I think that Sun World is mostly designed – I’m guessing – to present a series of instagrammable moments. At that, it excels, courtesy of flair, extravagance, colour, movement and imagination. More or less the first thing you arrive at 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, Sun World is self-described as a “Journey Through Fairyland”.
You don’t just walk around – or constantly get lost within, as the park has a kind of IKEA sensibility to its layout – 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 today. 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. A quick few snaps and then we’re into the cellar.
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.
There’s an extra charge to enter the Dubay Wine Cellar. It’s split into three price levels. I just wanted to go inside, so I/we opted for the 100,000 VND option, which translates to about $6 Australian, each. I thought at the time that this was an entry fee only, but it included a glass of wine, served at the end.
The Dubay Wine Cellar is a cave, made to look as though it’s carved into rock. This cellar is genuinely set into the side of the Ba Na Hills, so maybe it actually is rock, I didn’t tap on it to check. It is definitely, though, the strangest wine cellar I have had the pleasure of exploring.
It’s a faux cellar, in a fairy world, designed I guess for people to explore and 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 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, or rarity, or over-the-top-ness, or difference, are everything. If the uniqueness, or rarity, or over-the-top-ness, or difference can be easily explained or seen, then all the better.
The above notions ran through my mind as a) I got my head around a faux cellar, full of faux wine barrels, its ‘bins’ racked full of faux, empty wine bottles, and as b) my wife pointed out that, of all the exhibits in this fairy world, this faux wine cellar was by far the least popular.
But somebody in charge of the planning of Sun World had thought that a wine cellar was such a quaint little historic curio that it would look cute in among the flower dresses and pink chateau, much like the Seven Dwarfs kind of do.
No wonder they offered us a drink; suddenly, I was desperate for one. There were two red wines to choose from, and one chardonnay, the latter from “south eastern Australia” and 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 a wonderful human, my wife.
And so I stepped up to taste the first wine, full of hope.
The first of these reds smelled and tasted 100% of strawberry jam, so I smelled and tasted the second. It was okay, but rough as guts. We sat down then 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 an experience, and it sure was both those things.
A final thought: inside this faux cellar there is a carving of a man, stuck inside a wine barrel. There’s a photo of it below. This carving is a depiction of a small faux cellar inside the larger faux cellar that we were standing in. It 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. I don’t know if he makes it onto Instagram much though his fortunes will be better if he does. If I could have added a thought bubble to this lonely wooden man it would have read: I want what the others exhibits have got. In the five minutes that we were in the room with him, there wasn’t a single other visitor in sight.
The intrepid author/taster in the tasting area of the Dubay Wine Cellar.
Dubay Wine Cellar. Picture: Campbell Mattinson.
