China and expansion

Did I already mention that China is a big place? With a whole lotta people in it?

The country is opening up in a lot of ways -social, economic, science, and there is a growing group of people that can afford wine, but they haven't necessarily had it before. There are also a relatively high number of rich, who can afford very expensive (and usually French) wine, but of most interest to the domestic wine industry are those that are doing well, but not well enough to be called rich. You know, like the middle-class.

They know something about wine, probably on the order of, that it's something that rich people and foreigners drink, and that piques their interest enough to try it, or they might want to emulate the rich to climb the social ladder (what silly games we people play sometimes! :-)

So even though a small percent of people with the income buy wine, and only a fraction of those buy wine very often, because the absolute numbers are so big, it equates to a heap of wine being consumed domestically.

So, I've mentioned what they're doing on the vineyard side of things - planting large areas of grapes, but to accommodate those grapes, you need wineries to process them and make them into wine!

So I visited a few wineries there as well. The largest and most impressive was a brand new facility built by Chang Yu to service the large area of vineyards they had planted in the Yinchuan area. The finishing touches on the place were being done when we went through, and it was impressive to see a 20,000 tonne winery being put up, just like that!

Red wine tanks lined up all in a row.

Row upon row of tanks, one section devoted to whites, and the rest to reds (more reds than whites are made, by a large margin). The tanks for the latter had motorised stirrers built into the bottom to aid with extraction, and all had a chute by the door that the must could be pushed out and onto a conveyor which augers the skins and seeds to the presses.

The auger system they put in place to ferry the red must to the presses after fermentation. Keeping this clean will be a challenge!

Sorry, no two-tonne open-top fermenters here!!

While I've seen bigger wineries, I haven't seen one of this size going into a completely new viticultural region. Obviously, the company has big plans for wine from there!

The new Chang Yu Visitors Centre in Yinchuan -this building is dwarfed by the winery! When they do things, they do them big!

China -viticulture to the west

In this installment, I'm going to describe a few things that I saw in the Ningxia province, near its capital city, Yinchuan.

Yinchuan is known as a rural city, it having a population of "only" around one million people. It is an extremely spread out city, with incredibly straight roads that go long distances. One road runs for 40km through the city and is dead straight all the way!

The areas near Yinchuan are viticulture growth areas, as the climate there is thought to be well suited to wine production. The history goes back a bit, with a 1984 wine being recognised as the first white wine made in Ningxia. There are some good reasons to have grapes growing here - supposedly it has the second highest number of sunshine hours per year, second only to Tibet, which is probably a bit too harsh of an area! However, the same drawback are here - it's so cold and dry during the winter that the vines must be buried each autumn. A major headache, even in this land of plentiful labour.

Rainfall is only 200mm per year, but it can occur pretty much all at once! The wettest months on average are July through December, so right during the grape ripening season!

The soils are very sandy, so phylloxera is not yet a problem (it has been found in the Shandong province and in the areas around Beijing), and thus most vines are own-rooted, propagated by cuttings taken from another vineyard (which has meant the spread of virus has been wide and far!). Soil pH can be very high before amendment - 8.9!!

The soil in a vineyard near Yinchuan - pure sand!

I was told that there are about 5000 hectares of grapes in Ningxia, and a good yield for the red varieties they like to grow is in the range of 22 tonnes per hectare, which is very high!! Although the rows are reasonably far apart, the between vine spacing is very close.

Vines in the Chateau Helan vineyard, with the Helan Mountains in the background. Vines are very closely spaced, with the vertical trunks being laid down along the row in the Autumn, before being covered with soil.

All in all, a very different area to grow grapes!!