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!