GROWING A NAPA VALLEY IN CHINA
The growth of the wine market has led to prestigious awards and plans to create a tourism hub By Jane Sasseen
On an autumn evening in a fluorescent-lit classroom at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a dozen students listened intently. The speaker, Emma Gao, held a glass to the light and asked them to study the swirling liquid inside. Tsinghua is known as the “MIT of China,” but this was no freshman seminar in fluid mechanics. It was a gathering of the student wine club.
Ms Gao was conducting a tasting of recent vintages from her family-run winery in Ningxia, a remote Chinese region on the edge of the Gobi Desert. Behind desktops lined with glasses, the students sniffed and sipped, comparing a fruity red with a richer, oakier French-style wine.
Since her winery has begun to win international acclaim, Ms Gao, 38, has emerged as the unlikely new star of an even more unlikely new Chinese industry. The winery, Silver Heights, has been a pioneer in China, bringing sophisticated Western winemaking techniques to what had been an industry focused on bulk production.
Taking a cue from that boutique-winery model, Ningxia has ambitions to become the Napa Valley of China. Local winemakers have won prestigious awards, and plans are underway to double the region’s vineyards and create a wine tourism hub. Foreign investors have also taken notice. French Champagne maker Moet & Chandon makes sparkling wines there, while spirits giant Pernod Ricard is spending heavily to modernise its local winery.
Aided by the same long-range planning and government support that have brought success in everything from textiles to high-end electronics, China made 120 million cases of wine in 2014. That’s a bit less than a third of what is produced in the United States and just behind the export powerhouses Australia and Argentina.
But Chinese wine is made almost exclusively for the domestic market, says Ma Huiqin, a professor at China Agricultural University in Beijing who works closely with Ningxia’s wine industry. And until recently, most of it was barely drinkable by Western standards.
Now a new generation of Chinese winemakers is trying to upgrade quality in an effort to win over local wine drinkers as their tastes become more discerning, as well as capture the aficionados who drink mostly imports from France, America and elsewhere.
Sitting in her family’s compound outside the regional capital of Yinchuan, Ms Gao of Silver Heights looked out over the vineyard her father planted nearly 20 years ago. Among the first in the region to plant grapes, he suggested she go to France to study winemaking in 1999.
After earning a degree in oenology, she did a stint at the highly regarded Château CalonSégur, where she met, and eventually married, the winemaker.
After Ms Gao returned to China, the first vintage she and her father produced in 2007 was just 10 barrels, or 3,000 bottles. Today, Ms Gao makes four wines, with total production of 60,000 bottles. A 2013 bottle of her Summit label sells for around $75.
A poor coal region wedged below Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, with its hilly, arid scrubland, is ill suited for most agriculture. It’s dry and hot in the summer, with long, freezing winters. But its sandy, rocky soil proved ideal for growing grapes. The Helan Mountains to the west protect the vineyards from harsh desert winds, while cool nights keep the grapes from ripening too fast.
Eager to create a new industry, the regional government built extensive irrigation systems starting in the late 1990s and put winemaking at the centre of development plans. In 2005, the government helped start the area’s first “demonstration” winery, Helan Qingxue.
A major turning point came in 2011 when Helan Qingxue won a gold medal in a prestigious international competition by the British wine publication Decanter. A 2009 bottle of its Jia Bei Lan was named best red Bordeaux varietal over 10 pounds, beating out rivals from Napa, Australia and Bordeaux.
Suddenly, what had been a slow buildup turned into a stampede. The award “made people realise that wine could be a great business,” said Guo Xiaoheng, a native of the region who trained as a sommelier in France before returning to sell winemaking equipment.
A decade ago, Ningxia had just a handful of wineries. Today, there are more than 70, with 40 more under construction, and the government plans to reach 200 by 2020. As elsewhere in China, red wines dominate, mostly the Bordeaux blends — principally mixtures of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc — popular in China.
Ningxia’s growing reputation has attracted investment, as domestic and international players alike look at China’s market. The region’s wineries produced 270 million bottles in 2014, nearly triple the level of three years earlier.
The resulting boom has reshaped Yinchuan. Signs of prosperity are everywhere, from the five-star Kempinski Hotel to the office towers and apartment complexes popping up all across the city.
Much of the explosion in wine consumption was driven by government officials and executives at state-owned companies buying expensive vintages for banquets and gifts. In the last two years, the government has been on a tough anti-corruption campaign, and one consequence was a 12% drop in red wine consumption last year.
Many are also envisioning a time when top Chinese wines will be a common sight on the shelves of US or European stores.
Mike Insley, a New Zealander who recently arrived to upgrade Pernod Ricard’s vineyards, says the area reminds him of Marlborough — the centre of his country’s wine industry — in the late 1980s. Back then, New Zealand’s wines had no international recognition and its vintners were only beginning to understand the wines they produced.
Today, wine is New Zealand’s No 6 export, with sales of more than $940 million. “That’s what happens when a country gets this right,” Mr Insley said.