Red wine in them hills

Jack and Dah had me over for dinner, quite a nice pasta with little sea clams, plus a red wine that Jack said was a local Thai wine, 600 baht a bottle.

It was certainly drinkable. We did a second bottle. I thought about this. "Don't wine grapes have to grow in a cool place?"

"That's it, this stuff is only 100 clicks from Bangkok, it's a kind of hill station. Look at the bottle."


"Fourteen degrees latitude, that's not far."

Jack said "About three hundred meters above sea level. Cool nights, not far from our village. We're at two hundred." Jack and Dah were building another house in this little Isan village they had discovered, four hours from Bangkok.



Now after the second bottle Jack was mad to grow wine grapes. He wanted to know all about the climate there, he wanted me to compare Bangkok, and the PB wine growing place near Khao Yai, and his new village at the foot of the same hills a little to the west of Khao Yai. The next week, mid December, we took the bus to a little place south of Korat called Pak Tong Chai, near where Jack and Dah were building their house. An uncle picked us up and drove us around, we stayed a couple of days. The mornings were delightful, dew on the grass and nice little jungly tropical mists over the patches of rice paddy.


I took temp measurements with my roving Hobo, compared them with Bangkok. Here they are.




Cool nights indeed, you can see the difference at night, I shaded it blue. Sundown the temp dropped a lot up there, much more than Bangkok. You could se stars at night.