ChinaToday
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2011
- Messages
- 4,557
- Reaction score
- -2
- Country
- Location
China's new red army: The country's wine is starting to pique the interest of Western drinkers
The Chinese have been making wine for centuries - but how do their labels measure up?
Chinese wines do not exactly spring to mind when you consider top non-mainstream wines, but how about a spicy, aromatic and juicy red from the edge of the Gobi desert, in the west of China?
Waitrose has just started carrying Cabernet Gernischt, from Changyu, one of China's oldest wineries, and these days the hills of Shandong, Shanxi and Ningxia are home to vineyards growing Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling and Chardonnay grapes.
"We tried many different options from various countries but felt the Changyu Cabernet Gernischt was a strong proposition due to the style and quality of the wine," says Katie Mollet,
Waitrose's buyer for Chinese wine, adding: "We feel it is important to champion wine-producing countries which are outside the mainstream."
China is now the world's fifth biggest wine producer, producing more wine than Chile, and has more land under vines. In the old days, vines were for producing grape juice in China and dodgy local tipples ruled. There is still a lot of poor wine out there, but hard work over the last few years is paying off.
In Beijing last year, Chinese reds, mostly Bordeaux-style Cabernet Sauvignon-based blends, took the top four places in a China versus Bordeaux blind-tasting competition.
China has quite a heritage in wine archaeological digs have uncovered evidence that the Chinese were making wine in 212 BC. Among the country's top wines are the 2009 Chairman's Reserve from the Grace Vineyards in Ningxia province, Silver Heights' The Summit, also from Ningxia, a small, sparsely populated region in north-central China. In September last year, He Lan Qing Xue's 2009 Cabernet blend, again from Ningxia, won at the Decanter World Wine Awards.
Changyu was set up by Jesuits in Yantai, Shandong province, more than 100 years ago and is now state-owned. It has a French-style chateau, the Chateau Changyu-Castel.
Tan Shaoyun, head of Changyu's export division, is delighted by the Waitrose decision to sell its wine, as Britain is the most competitive wine market in Europe. "It is a breakthrough for Changyu's image and recognition to gain a listing with this highly reputable customer," she says. "Changyu is on a mission to bring its best wines to Europe and the world. The wine has character and is different from all other world red wines it is unique."
The Chinese market looks set to develop like Australia did in decades before. Tan says: "Look where they are now. China with its massive domestic market will overshadow all the new world wine countries and establish itself as a leader of the global wine industry. If you extrapolate the growth of Chinese consumption in the next seven years, China will be the biggest consumer of wine in the world and also be a force on export."
The Cabernet Gernischt is grown under organic conditions in Ningxia, an ideal microclimate at 1,100 metres. "And it reflects the true Chinese spirit, with its focus on aromatics and spices. It is truly easy to drink," says Tan.
Gabriel Savage, deputy editor of the Drinks Business online magazine, says that for all the excitement about Western wines being sold in the East, the Waitrose listing shows China is also sending increasing quantities of its own products to the West. "It will be interesting to watch the rise of Chinese wine and spirits products flowing West and the implications of this for Europe and America's producers as they potentially face some serious competition."
Christian Pillsbury is managing director of Applied Wine, a Hong Kong start-up that manages complete wine programmes for restaurants in Hong Kong and China. He believes that Waitrose creating a category for Chinese wines in Britain will prove key to creating the possibility that Chinese wines are more than a novelty.
Just like selling Californian wine in the early 1960s, or selling wine under a screwcap in the 1990s, Chinese wine has to become a possibility before it can find enduring success in export markets.
Pillsbury's favourite Chinese wine is Grace Vineyard's Chairman's Reserve, while Grace's Merlot-based Deep Blue has the novelty and quality needed to convince sommeliers to present the wine with confidence.
"Grace Vineyard's higher level wines are well made and improving with every vintage," says Pillsbury, a 15-year veteran of the global wine industry and a former sommelier and retailer.
Initially, Chinese wine looks like following the path that Chile took, producing large volumes of inexpensive wines to introduce consumers to an unfamiliar appellation, followed by moving up the value chain to mid-priced varietals that are represented by larger, consumer-friendly brands.
"Ultimately, China's main market is, and will be, China. Consumption levels are rising incredibly quickly, and there is no export necessity. For example, Grace Vineyard could sell two bottles for every one they produce, due to raw demand. Whereas Chile needs to export for lack of enough domestic demand, China needs to import," says Pillsbury.
"I think that China will certainly become a global competitor with modest cost of production and growing quality. The challenge will be China's emerging water crisis, and consumer confidence in the integrity of Chinese agricultural produce," he adds.
Waitrose went for the Cabernet Gernischt after tasting a number of wines. "We thought the Changyu Cabernet Gernischt 2011 was a particularly interesting wine with good fruit concentration," Mollet says.
Whether China becomes a bigger player in the UK depends on customers' reactions to Chinese wine, how much the Chinese are prepared to invest in markets overseas and how flexible they can be in changing the style of their wines to suit the needs of export markets.
"The challenge," says Mollet, "will be routes to market for Chinese wine in the EU, unlike Chilean wine, which already has an established supply chain and considerable demand for their wines from UK consumers. Chinese wine producers would also have to work closely with UK retailers or importers to ensure that the style of their wines will work for our consumers. Neither of these things will change overnight but further into the future, who knows?"
China's new red army: The country's wine is starting to pique the interest of Western drinkers - Features - Food & Drink - The Independent
Châteaux China
At several wineries, it is clear that Ningxia’s raw material is impressively consistent, and five qualify as excellent
You know a wine venture is a success if you have the world’s most energetic purveyor of special glasses and decanters, Georg Riedel of Austria, volunteering to take part.
Two weeks ago, I flew to a remote province of China to participate in the inaugural Ningxia Wine Festival. But Riedel got there several days before me – and when I managed to visit the wine producer who first alerted me to the potential of Ningxia, vivacious Emma Gao of Silver Heights, I found that her collection of Riedel glassware took up almost more room than her tiny barrel cellar.
Ningxia is a small, impoverished province 550 miles west of Beijing. Until recently it was best known for its inhospitable mountains and desert, sheep and goji berries, but local government officials have become convinced that Ningxia’s future lies in wine. A campaign started in earnest in the late 1990s when the Ningxia Agricultural Reclamation Management Bureau swung into action, transforming the desert between the Yellow River and the eastern slopes of the Helan Mountains into potential vineyard by determined applications of irrigation water, cover crops and bulldozers. It was clear that cereals and corn wouldn’t do well there, but that the vines that produced a drink the Chinese were rapidly becoming interested in would thrive.
Before then there had been just one winery in the area, Xi Xia King, but, in a sign of the times, it is now engaged in a joint venture with LVMH to produce its first Chinese sparkling wine, supplying the raw material for the 5,300 sq m winery currently being constructed nearby. The result will be sold as Chandon, the international brand name for sister fizzes to Moët champagne.
LVMH is the second French drinks giant to have committed itself to Ningxia. In 2008, Pernod Ricard took out a lease on a substantial proportion of one of the first big vineyards to be reclaimed and sells competent varietals, mainly in China, under the Helan Mountain label. Others who have constructed or are constructing vast “châteaux” designed as tourist magnets include not just an array of private investors, but also two of the three big Chinese wine producers: Changyu (which, inter alia, is in partnership with Ch Lafite in China’s first wine region, Shandong, in the north-east), and Cofco, which makes Great Wall wines. Dynasty has been making Imperial Horse wine in Ningxia for many years.
A big advantage Ningxia has over many other Chinese wine regions is that the government owns the land, so can lease large tracts of it, which can be farmed exactly as the producer wishes, in a single transaction. In Shandong, for instance, the land is owned by thousands of smallholders. In Shanxi, where Grace Vineyards, for long one of China’s most admired wineries, is based, the bulk of the grapes have to be bought in and there is a constant battle to persuade peasant smallholders with no wine culture that, for example, small grapes packed full of flavour are more useful to a winemaker than large juicy ones.
But is the nascent wine region of Ningxia propelled by expediency and local government determination, or by the fact that it does actually produce superior wine? It was to try to establish this, and to act as one of a handful of judges in the first Ningxia Wine Awards, that I flew there.
We tasted eight white wines and 32 reds blind and were asked to mark them variously as deficient, commercially acceptable, good or excellent. In my four previous tastings of the best Chinese wines, undertaken roughly every two years since 2002, it was a struggle to find wines that qualified as commercially acceptable. This time, however, I found five that qualified as excellent, and only six that were less than commercially acceptable (due only to the very easily remedied fault of oxidation). Both in the awards and at several wineries, it was clear that Ningxia’s raw material is impressively consistent.
Moët may be betting on sparkling white (rosé doesn’t sell in China), but the great majority of what is currently produced in Ningxia is red – mostly Cabernet and Merlot, as is the Chinese way. The wines have an attractive frankness of fruit, rarely more than 13 per cent alcohol nicely balanced by natural acidity and, oxidation apart, were generally both clean and expressive. Although summer days are warm and (generally) dry, temperatures reliably fall at night at this altitude (over 1,000m) so that the growing season is not too short. But winters are almost as severe, and early, as they are in China’s westernmost wine province Xinjiang, so that here too, vines have to be buried every autumn to save them from freezing to death. For the moment the Ningxia government can provide relatively cheap labour, having moved so much of the population from the inhospitable mountains in the south to specially built settlements around the capital Yinchuan. But the continued urbanisation of China will surely start to make wine production in Ningxia much more expensive. And what, everyone wonders, will happen when those leases run out?
I did keep finding one very strong, unfamiliar flavour in our blind tasting though: a green streak accompanied by something peppery. This is the local grape speciality known as Cabernet Gernischt, which my Wine Grapes co-author José Vouillamoz’s DNA profiling has shown to be identical to the Carmenère best known in Chile. Chile’s climate is much warmer than Ningxia’s but, even there, Carmenère can be difficult to divest of its greenness, and in Ningxia this is a much more serious problem.
There are some who argue that Cabernet Gernischt should be promoted as Ningxia’s distinguishing mark, but I’m not convinced, especially since a significant proportion of the plants are affected by leafroll virus which exacerbates the problem by slowing ripening.
Perhaps it’s time Chinese wine producers ventured outside the confines of Bordeaux’s red wine grapes and perhaps Ningxia, suddenly China’s most wine-minded province by far, could lead the way? I’d love to see the Riedel Ningxia Syrah glass, or even one for Riesling.
Châteaux China - FT.com
The Chinese have been making wine for centuries - but how do their labels measure up?
Chinese wines do not exactly spring to mind when you consider top non-mainstream wines, but how about a spicy, aromatic and juicy red from the edge of the Gobi desert, in the west of China?
Waitrose has just started carrying Cabernet Gernischt, from Changyu, one of China's oldest wineries, and these days the hills of Shandong, Shanxi and Ningxia are home to vineyards growing Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling and Chardonnay grapes.
"We tried many different options from various countries but felt the Changyu Cabernet Gernischt was a strong proposition due to the style and quality of the wine," says Katie Mollet,
Waitrose's buyer for Chinese wine, adding: "We feel it is important to champion wine-producing countries which are outside the mainstream."
China is now the world's fifth biggest wine producer, producing more wine than Chile, and has more land under vines. In the old days, vines were for producing grape juice in China and dodgy local tipples ruled. There is still a lot of poor wine out there, but hard work over the last few years is paying off.
In Beijing last year, Chinese reds, mostly Bordeaux-style Cabernet Sauvignon-based blends, took the top four places in a China versus Bordeaux blind-tasting competition.
China has quite a heritage in wine archaeological digs have uncovered evidence that the Chinese were making wine in 212 BC. Among the country's top wines are the 2009 Chairman's Reserve from the Grace Vineyards in Ningxia province, Silver Heights' The Summit, also from Ningxia, a small, sparsely populated region in north-central China. In September last year, He Lan Qing Xue's 2009 Cabernet blend, again from Ningxia, won at the Decanter World Wine Awards.
Changyu was set up by Jesuits in Yantai, Shandong province, more than 100 years ago and is now state-owned. It has a French-style chateau, the Chateau Changyu-Castel.
Tan Shaoyun, head of Changyu's export division, is delighted by the Waitrose decision to sell its wine, as Britain is the most competitive wine market in Europe. "It is a breakthrough for Changyu's image and recognition to gain a listing with this highly reputable customer," she says. "Changyu is on a mission to bring its best wines to Europe and the world. The wine has character and is different from all other world red wines it is unique."
The Chinese market looks set to develop like Australia did in decades before. Tan says: "Look where they are now. China with its massive domestic market will overshadow all the new world wine countries and establish itself as a leader of the global wine industry. If you extrapolate the growth of Chinese consumption in the next seven years, China will be the biggest consumer of wine in the world and also be a force on export."
The Cabernet Gernischt is grown under organic conditions in Ningxia, an ideal microclimate at 1,100 metres. "And it reflects the true Chinese spirit, with its focus on aromatics and spices. It is truly easy to drink," says Tan.
Gabriel Savage, deputy editor of the Drinks Business online magazine, says that for all the excitement about Western wines being sold in the East, the Waitrose listing shows China is also sending increasing quantities of its own products to the West. "It will be interesting to watch the rise of Chinese wine and spirits products flowing West and the implications of this for Europe and America's producers as they potentially face some serious competition."
Christian Pillsbury is managing director of Applied Wine, a Hong Kong start-up that manages complete wine programmes for restaurants in Hong Kong and China. He believes that Waitrose creating a category for Chinese wines in Britain will prove key to creating the possibility that Chinese wines are more than a novelty.
Just like selling Californian wine in the early 1960s, or selling wine under a screwcap in the 1990s, Chinese wine has to become a possibility before it can find enduring success in export markets.
Pillsbury's favourite Chinese wine is Grace Vineyard's Chairman's Reserve, while Grace's Merlot-based Deep Blue has the novelty and quality needed to convince sommeliers to present the wine with confidence.
"Grace Vineyard's higher level wines are well made and improving with every vintage," says Pillsbury, a 15-year veteran of the global wine industry and a former sommelier and retailer.
Initially, Chinese wine looks like following the path that Chile took, producing large volumes of inexpensive wines to introduce consumers to an unfamiliar appellation, followed by moving up the value chain to mid-priced varietals that are represented by larger, consumer-friendly brands.
"Ultimately, China's main market is, and will be, China. Consumption levels are rising incredibly quickly, and there is no export necessity. For example, Grace Vineyard could sell two bottles for every one they produce, due to raw demand. Whereas Chile needs to export for lack of enough domestic demand, China needs to import," says Pillsbury.
"I think that China will certainly become a global competitor with modest cost of production and growing quality. The challenge will be China's emerging water crisis, and consumer confidence in the integrity of Chinese agricultural produce," he adds.
Waitrose went for the Cabernet Gernischt after tasting a number of wines. "We thought the Changyu Cabernet Gernischt 2011 was a particularly interesting wine with good fruit concentration," Mollet says.
Whether China becomes a bigger player in the UK depends on customers' reactions to Chinese wine, how much the Chinese are prepared to invest in markets overseas and how flexible they can be in changing the style of their wines to suit the needs of export markets.
"The challenge," says Mollet, "will be routes to market for Chinese wine in the EU, unlike Chilean wine, which already has an established supply chain and considerable demand for their wines from UK consumers. Chinese wine producers would also have to work closely with UK retailers or importers to ensure that the style of their wines will work for our consumers. Neither of these things will change overnight but further into the future, who knows?"
China's new red army: The country's wine is starting to pique the interest of Western drinkers - Features - Food & Drink - The Independent
Châteaux China
At several wineries, it is clear that Ningxia’s raw material is impressively consistent, and five qualify as excellent
You know a wine venture is a success if you have the world’s most energetic purveyor of special glasses and decanters, Georg Riedel of Austria, volunteering to take part.
Two weeks ago, I flew to a remote province of China to participate in the inaugural Ningxia Wine Festival. But Riedel got there several days before me – and when I managed to visit the wine producer who first alerted me to the potential of Ningxia, vivacious Emma Gao of Silver Heights, I found that her collection of Riedel glassware took up almost more room than her tiny barrel cellar.
Ningxia is a small, impoverished province 550 miles west of Beijing. Until recently it was best known for its inhospitable mountains and desert, sheep and goji berries, but local government officials have become convinced that Ningxia’s future lies in wine. A campaign started in earnest in the late 1990s when the Ningxia Agricultural Reclamation Management Bureau swung into action, transforming the desert between the Yellow River and the eastern slopes of the Helan Mountains into potential vineyard by determined applications of irrigation water, cover crops and bulldozers. It was clear that cereals and corn wouldn’t do well there, but that the vines that produced a drink the Chinese were rapidly becoming interested in would thrive.
Before then there had been just one winery in the area, Xi Xia King, but, in a sign of the times, it is now engaged in a joint venture with LVMH to produce its first Chinese sparkling wine, supplying the raw material for the 5,300 sq m winery currently being constructed nearby. The result will be sold as Chandon, the international brand name for sister fizzes to Moët champagne.
LVMH is the second French drinks giant to have committed itself to Ningxia. In 2008, Pernod Ricard took out a lease on a substantial proportion of one of the first big vineyards to be reclaimed and sells competent varietals, mainly in China, under the Helan Mountain label. Others who have constructed or are constructing vast “châteaux” designed as tourist magnets include not just an array of private investors, but also two of the three big Chinese wine producers: Changyu (which, inter alia, is in partnership with Ch Lafite in China’s first wine region, Shandong, in the north-east), and Cofco, which makes Great Wall wines. Dynasty has been making Imperial Horse wine in Ningxia for many years.
A big advantage Ningxia has over many other Chinese wine regions is that the government owns the land, so can lease large tracts of it, which can be farmed exactly as the producer wishes, in a single transaction. In Shandong, for instance, the land is owned by thousands of smallholders. In Shanxi, where Grace Vineyards, for long one of China’s most admired wineries, is based, the bulk of the grapes have to be bought in and there is a constant battle to persuade peasant smallholders with no wine culture that, for example, small grapes packed full of flavour are more useful to a winemaker than large juicy ones.
But is the nascent wine region of Ningxia propelled by expediency and local government determination, or by the fact that it does actually produce superior wine? It was to try to establish this, and to act as one of a handful of judges in the first Ningxia Wine Awards, that I flew there.
We tasted eight white wines and 32 reds blind and were asked to mark them variously as deficient, commercially acceptable, good or excellent. In my four previous tastings of the best Chinese wines, undertaken roughly every two years since 2002, it was a struggle to find wines that qualified as commercially acceptable. This time, however, I found five that qualified as excellent, and only six that were less than commercially acceptable (due only to the very easily remedied fault of oxidation). Both in the awards and at several wineries, it was clear that Ningxia’s raw material is impressively consistent.
Moët may be betting on sparkling white (rosé doesn’t sell in China), but the great majority of what is currently produced in Ningxia is red – mostly Cabernet and Merlot, as is the Chinese way. The wines have an attractive frankness of fruit, rarely more than 13 per cent alcohol nicely balanced by natural acidity and, oxidation apart, were generally both clean and expressive. Although summer days are warm and (generally) dry, temperatures reliably fall at night at this altitude (over 1,000m) so that the growing season is not too short. But winters are almost as severe, and early, as they are in China’s westernmost wine province Xinjiang, so that here too, vines have to be buried every autumn to save them from freezing to death. For the moment the Ningxia government can provide relatively cheap labour, having moved so much of the population from the inhospitable mountains in the south to specially built settlements around the capital Yinchuan. But the continued urbanisation of China will surely start to make wine production in Ningxia much more expensive. And what, everyone wonders, will happen when those leases run out?
I did keep finding one very strong, unfamiliar flavour in our blind tasting though: a green streak accompanied by something peppery. This is the local grape speciality known as Cabernet Gernischt, which my Wine Grapes co-author José Vouillamoz’s DNA profiling has shown to be identical to the Carmenère best known in Chile. Chile’s climate is much warmer than Ningxia’s but, even there, Carmenère can be difficult to divest of its greenness, and in Ningxia this is a much more serious problem.
There are some who argue that Cabernet Gernischt should be promoted as Ningxia’s distinguishing mark, but I’m not convinced, especially since a significant proportion of the plants are affected by leafroll virus which exacerbates the problem by slowing ripening.
Perhaps it’s time Chinese wine producers ventured outside the confines of Bordeaux’s red wine grapes and perhaps Ningxia, suddenly China’s most wine-minded province by far, could lead the way? I’d love to see the Riedel Ningxia Syrah glass, or even one for Riesling.
Châteaux China - FT.com
