Sweet taste of a very high life

Frenchman Jean-Marc Nolant raises a toast in the world's highest hotel bar. He has good reason to celebrate.

The 34-year-old gets paid to drink very expensive wine in an amazing hotel, which towers above a truly exciting city. The Park Hyatt Shanghai occupies the 79th to 93rd floors of the Shanghai World Financial Center and the wine sommelier's workplace provides an unrivalled view.

"If one compares Shanghai to a bottle of wine, it would be a new-world wine, which means not a wine from Europe, because it's very modern," he says. "It's also a wine with a lot of unique characteristics and a strong flavor. Shanghai is a fantastic bottle of Argentina wine."

Nolant's first impression when he settled into this exotic new world was one of shock. He called his mother and broke the big news.

"I told her Shanghai was just like a concrete jungle. Instead of trees, you have buildings everywhere and that's crazy."

Nolant confesses he misses the hillsides, vineyards, fields and fresh air of the French countryside, but has quickly adapted to the fast pace of his new home.

"Shanghai is a city of contrasts," he says. "I think you have all these brand-new buildings but at the same time, you have the people that are very closely attached to their roots, to the past, to their history."

Like many other expats in China, Nolant says language poses the biggest challenge. "But learning Chinese is very rewarding. When you start to talk to the taxi driver, to tell them where you are living, where to turn right and left that's sort of fun."

Born and raised in the wine region of Champagne, Nolant discovered his passion for wine at the sweet age of 16.

During his school holidays, he would venture to the vineyards to pick and cut grapes and later studied oenology (wine and winemaking) and geology at the Universite de Bourgogne in Dijon, France and took up all kinds of wine-related jobs including as waiter, wine-maker and sommelier.

Notlant says his taste for wine began to develop at the tender age of 3. "My parents used to have parties at home and of course they served Champagne," he says. "When the guests left, they left their glasses on the table half empty and I would just grab whatever was left and drink it. That was pretty much how I started to enjoy Champagne."

He says the years between 1998 and 2000 were the most rewarding because he shifted his interest from French wines to new world wines. He studied the winemaking practices of nearly 200 international wine regions.

"I started to draw a road on the map of where I wanted to go, where I wanted to drive and stop, and the more I progressed, the more I told myself 'I want to go here, here and here'," he says. "And my notes completely filled the map."

But what explains this preoccupation with wine?

"Wine is the noblest produce of conviviality and I consider sharing a bottle of wine with friends to be the essence of life," he says. "Surrounding myself with winemakers and understanding the soils of their vineyards is like understanding the roots of their culture. I like to think of it as a healthy obsession."

(China Daily 06/08/2009 page10)