An EnglishmAn’s vinE25 romAncE in chinA
He has had to overcome party politics, angry farmers and the occasional typhoon but vineyard owner and businessman Chris Ruffle’s wines are now being exported to Britain
oNE weekend in 2004 a Shanghai-based businessman and amateur wine buff called Chris Ruffle took his wife Tiffany to the Grace Vineyard in the northern Chinese province of Shanxi. At the time winemaking in China was in its infancy and Ruffle didn’t think much of what he was offered that day.
“The wine they were making was so poor, I thought I can do better than this,” he recalls. “I’m going to make the best wine in China.”
A French wine consultant called Gerard Colin duly introduced him to a 50-acre plot in the coastal region of Shandong, 450 miles south-east of Beijing. Fourteen years later, having spent millions of pounds, spread 600 tons of chicken manure and endured many major and minor run-ins with the local bureaucracy, Ruffle has a business producing up to 100,000 bottles of wine a year, which has just exported its first consignment of 6,900 bottles to the UK.
But it could all have gone very differently. “I’d been to Napa Valley [California], I’d been to Hunter Valley [Australia] and I could see the possibilities, how you could develop tourism and create employment in what was a pretty poor little area,” he says. “But the Communist Party officials had got no experience of that so they couldn’t see it. They just saw me as a crazy foreigner and their approach was, ‘Let’s try to carve off as much as we can while he’s still interested’.”
Ruffle ploughed on regardless. He imported all his vines from France, planting a third of the vineyard in 2005 and the rest in 2007.
No vineyard is complete without an imposing mansion of course. “I’m not French so I couldn’t build a chateau,” he says. “But I had experience of rebuilding a castle near St Andrews with an architect called Ian Begg. I remember a conversation we had as the rain was going horizontal one day on the site. I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to build a Scottish castle somewhere warmer’. So I sent him a letter saying ‘I’ve found the spot’.”
BEGG, the godfather of Scottish castle design who died last November at the age of 92, duly got on a plane to China and the sketch he drew on his first visit to the site “looks pretty like what it ended up as”, according to Ruffle. The castle is all the more authentic because it was built using blocks of grey granite drawn from a nearby quarry that looks very like the stone used for similar buildings in north-east Scotland.
Completed in 2009 the castle – now stuffed with imported antiques – has a banqueting hall, library, billiards room, restaurant, shop and guest bedrooms with fourposter beds. There is even an Aga in the kitchen – finished in “claret” naturally. It has become something of a tourist attraction and, as well as serving as Ruffle’s winery, operates as a boutique hotel.
He inherited another visitor magnet: a temple manned by three priests that is dedicated to the 13th-century Taoist Qiu Chuji. PHILOSOPHICAL: Chris presents wine to a Taoist priest from Qiu Chuji temple, a visitor magnet “The temple was knocked down during the Cultural Revolution but since we moved here it has been rebuilt by public subscription.
“Qiu Chuji is quite famous but he is about to become a lot more famous because one of the most popular books in Chinese is a series by a man called Jin Yong, which have sold something like 300 million copies. They are being published for the first time in English by a British publisher under the title Legends Of The Condor Heroes and Qiu Chuji is a major character in the books.”
The 12-volume series is described as “a Chinese Lord Of The Rings” and Ruffle has even named a wine The Philosopher in Qiu Chuji’s honour. Other wines pay tribute to Prince Gong (The Prince), a member of the Qing dynasty “who was in favour of negotiating with foreigners rather than fighting them” and Sir Robert Hart (The Inspector General), the man who ran the Chinese customs for 40 years during the 19th-century Treaty Ports era, when Britain had preferential access to five ports on China’s eastern seaboard.
By 2014 Ruffle’s epic battles with “incompetent builders, corruption, village politics and irate farmers”, as well as the occasional typhoon, appeared to be paying off. Then a local contact dropped a bombshell: the authorities had decided to build a six-lane motorway right through the middle of his vineyard. The Yorkshireman wasn’t about to accept this without a fight. “I produced a banner saying ‘Protect the environment – oppose the motorway’ and we trooped off to the mayor’s office,” he recalls. “There he was smoking a gold-tipped cigarette on his sofa and said, ‘I’m terribly sorry Chris, I can’t get anyone’s attention, it’s all been decided in Jinan [the provincial capital]’.
“I said, ‘I can help you gain some attention to this’ and I unrolled my banner. His cigarette stopped halfway to his mouth and he said, ‘I wouldn’t do that. If you do that, some of the farmers might call in the police and someone might get hurt’. It’s a dictatorship after all.” The motorway was constructed in record time, complete with three bridges, which enable the 59-yearold to move machinery between the two halves of his divided plot. “My current campaign is to get them called the Marselan Bridge, the Merlot Bridge and the Chardonnay Bridge in big Chinese letters on the side.”
THE project is a remarkable achievement for a man who only decided to study Chinese at Oxford University as “an act of youthful rebellion”. In the late 1970s – when Ruffle was there – China was not the global force it is today and he was one of just four students studying Mandarin. After graduating he spent two years selling Fairy toilet soap in Newcastle before getting a job with a metal trading outfit in Beijing in 1983. It proved to be the start of a 30-year career in Asia, culminating in a lucrative career in fund management Daily Express Tuesday March 27 2018 that has enabled him to pursue his winemaking dream.
His company Treaty Port Vineyard is now a respected producer with a capital value of £5million. Under the direction of Australian wine-maker Mark Davidson it won two medals in the 2017 China Wine and Spirits Awards: a silver for its 2015 Castle Red and a gold for its 2015 Debutante Rosé. A red Syrah is on sale in the UK for £13, with a rosé and a white chardonnay available for £12.50, and Ruffle is looking to target Chinese restaurants as well as individual consumers.
“When I started this there was just a mud track, no lighting and a few small villages,” says the fatherof-four, who now spends most of his time in the UK as his younger daughter recently started school in Sevenoaks, Kent. “There is a new airport, motorway being built and Chateau Lafite now have a vineyard next to mine. We can make this into China’s Napa Valley.” To buy Treaty Port wine go to therealwineco.co.uk