In the shadow of the Helan Mountains, not far from a remote section of the Great Wall, a rush of ambitious winemakers are working to turn a once-desolate swath of Ningxia into China’s answer to Bordeaux.
Photographs by Matilde Gattoni
Admiring the orderly rows of grapevines that stretch away to the foothills of the rugged Helan Mountain range, it’s hard to imagine that little more than two decades ago, this arid corner of north-central China was just a forlorn stretch of sand worked by subsistence farmers. As the morning mist lifts, I watch as scores of women dressed in jeans, light sweaters, and colorful headscarves move among the vines, expertly cutting the dark, ripe grapes and collecting them in green plastic crates.
It’s harvest time in Ningxia and a chilly breeze is blowing across the vast plain on the outskirts of Yinchuan, the capital of this small autonomous region. At the Helan Mountain vineyard, a 400-hectare estate owned by Pernod Ricard, I speak with chief winemaker Yanling Ren about Ningxia’s viticultural revolution. The energetic 42-year-old grew up in a village near here; she tells me that her parents were already growing grapes back in the ’90s. “When I was 15, I would sneak out to have a sip of the wine my parents were making,” she recounts with a laugh. “My parents didn’t allow me to drink, but I really enjoyed it.”
Yanling is part of a group of strong-willed, talented people who are leading China’s wine revolution. Thanks to their vision and commitment, what was once an impoverished rural province at the edge of the Gobi Desert has turned into winemaking’s new frontier. Two hours west of Beijing by plane, Ningxia today hosts more than 40,000 hectares of vines and 199 wineries, the majority of them boutique estates producing less than 100,000 bottles per year each. Ningxia’s wines have already won several prestigious international competitions and are sold in top restaurants, hotels, and stores around the world.
While China has produced wine for millennia, the country’s modern relationship with it developed only since the 1980s, when the government decided to discourage the widespread consumption of baijiu, the traditional grain-based liquors that were diverting billions of kilos of precious staple food for the production of alcohol. Chinese state officials started praising the health benefits of wine instead, while technicians and agrarians traveled to Europe to acquaint themselves with a product with which no one in China was really familiar.
On the Yinchuan Plain of northern Ningxia, land was being reclaimed from the desert and planted with trees and grapes imported from Europe, with water from the nearby Yellow River providing the necessary irrigation. Wine producers were granted discounted land leases and started hiring foreign consultants, while the regional government offered scholarships for oenology studies and hosted several international wine competitions. These concerted efforts slowly started to pay off: the local wine business began to boom around 2007 and is now Ningxia’s second biggest industry after coal.
Although China boasts several wine-producing regions, Ningxia has been identified by local and international experts as the best, thanks to an exceptional combination of sandy soil, high altitude, long daylight hours, and low precipitation, with the Helan Mountains along its northwestern border providing a natural barrier to the sandstorms of Inner Mongolia. Around 90 percent of the region’s production focuses on red, with cabernet sauvignon as the most popular variety (others include merlot, marselan, pinot noir and, for white wine, chardonnay and riesling). The quality is surprisingly good considering how young the industry is and that most of the vines are less than 20 years old. What Ningxia wines still lack in complexity and structure is compensated by their fruitiness, freshness, and minerality, which could become the region’s defining characteristics.
Producing wine in Ningxia is not without its challenges. Vines are buried every winter to survive the freezing temperatures—which can drop to -27°C—and unburied in spring. It is an expensive and risky process that kills between three to five percent of vines every year. Yet despite the challenges, Ningxia nowadays is abuzz with pioneers hoping to turn wine into the next gold rush. Some of their wineries are prefabricated metal cubes opened by aficionados with limited means but a serious passion for wine, while others are grandiose châteaux built in classic French style. Among the latter is Changyu Moser XV, a US$79 million fairytale castle surrounded by 66 hectares of vineyards and featuring a cinema and a wine museum.
The winery is a joint venture between Changyu— China’s oldest wine producer—and chief winemaker Lenz Maria Moser, the 63-year-old descendant of one of Austria’s most famous winemaking families. “I am deeply convinced that, over time, we can really produce world-class wines here,” explains Moser, who wants to turn Château Changyu Moser XV into one of the world’s best wineries in just a few years’ time. “Our products are already sold in more than 25 countries and we want to go even more global. China needs to benchmark itself internationally in order to be successful on the home front.”
The local wine boom has attracted international heavyweights such as Pernod Ricard (which bought Helan Mountain vineyard in 2012) and French luxury conglomerate LVMH (which opened Chandon China in 2013) as well as local investors like Chen Deqi, the visionary president of the Thai-Chinese food giant Daysun Group and owner of Ho-Lan Soul, Ningxia’s biggest organic winery. Over the next decade, Chen plans to build a wine tourism complex spanning 6,700 hectares and featuring 30 wineries, artificial lakes, hotels, a ski resort, and a crumbling section of the Great Wall of China. The project is expected to cost a staggering US$865 million, but Chen doesn’t seem concerned. “The conditions to grow grapes here are better than in Bordeaux and the market is constantly growing,” he explains during a visit to Ho-Lan Soul’s state-of-the-art wine cave, lit by futuristic purple spotlights. “The world’s biggest wine market will soon be China.”
Lily Zhang, the elegant owner of the two-year-old Fei Tswei Winery, believes so as well. Zhang and her husband are longtime wine lovers who originally wanted to buy a château in France, but were persuaded by a local wine expert to invest in Ningxia instead. Financed by her family’s Hong Kong–based oil company, the result is a US$21 million facility whose main building—a long rectangular structure with a rust-red facade—was designed with Australia’s Uluru in mind.
“We are not worried about the quality of our wine but about the [perception of] Chinese consumers,” says Zhang, who grows 11 different grape varieties on 82 hectares of vineyards. “Many don’t know Ningxia and still think our country cannot produce good wine.”
As the night prepares to fall on the plains of Ningxia, the workers return to the wineries carrying crates filled with the precious fruit. The grapes will immediately be sorted, pressed, and put in steel tanks to begin fermentation, the first step on their long journey to become wine. At the award-winning Kanaan Winery, Zhou Shuzhen, a distinguished winemaker who works for several estates in the area, observes the whole process by peering out of a window that overlooks the vines. While conceding that Ningxia wines can’t yet match the quality of their French, Italian, or American counterparts, she believes the region has all it takes to make a name for itself. “I feel privileged and proud to witness the stage this industry has reached,” Zhou says with a smile. “More and more Chinese winemakers are touring the world and learning new techniques which help us improve. We still have a long way to go, but I am very confident in our future.”
The Details
Ningxia’s regional capital, Yinchuan, is a city of two million people cradled between the Yellow River and the Helan Mountains. A two-hour flight from Beijing, it’s notable for a collection of ancient imperial tombs as well as being the place where Genghis Khan died in 1227, during the Mongol invasion of the city. Located across from People’s Square in the center of town, Kempinski Hotel Yinchuan (doubles from US$115) is the place to stay.
Wineries
Château Changyu Moser XV
changyu-moser-xv.de
Fei Tswei Winery
facebook.com/feitsweiwinery
Helan Mountain
helanmountain.com
Ho-Lan Soul
holansoul.com
Kanaan Winery
kanaanchina.com
This article originally appeared in the August/November 2020 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Pressing Forward”).