China’s potential lures an adventurous winemaker from France(1)
He stood amid giant new warehouses and processing facilities — the boxy, workaday headquarters of a winemaking empire that he has helped build in less than a decade from this redoubt in the western reaches of China. It’s an ambitious project in a nation where most people still call the unfamiliar beverage “red liquor.”
“In 2000 most of these buildings weren’t here,” said Nauleau, a phlegmatic and compact 42-year-old with bright blue eyes and a shock of unruly brown curls. “In the beginning it was quite difficult.”
The fertile plains of Xinjiang Province — closer in culture and geography to Istanbul than Beijing — have lured speculators since the days of the Silk Road. Nauleau is part of a new generation of adventurers gambling that this land can produce wine good enough to traverse the globe.
Xinjiang, which is more than three times the size of France, sprawls across the 45th parallel, the mythic ribbon of the planet that slices across Bordeaux, Piedmont and Oregon. The temperate climate along the 45th produces vast fields of sunflowers and cotton, as well as table grapes and melons that are renowned for their sweetness.
Nauleau is the winemaker for Vini-Suntime International, which calls itself the largest wine producer in Asia. It has 25,000 acres of vineyards in China, six wineries and a total bottling capacity of 200 tons of wine per day.
Some of that wine is sold in America under the label China Silk, which was launched in 2006. It is sold in 14 states and expected to be available nationwide by the end of 2009, according to its president, Steve Clarke.
Most of Suntime’s product is consumed in China, which has begun to look beyond its traditional favorites, beer and the ferocious grain alcohol known as baijiu, to consume a growing share of wine, including some of the world’s best.
In a sign of growing interest among Chinese collectors, Hong Kong earlier this year scrapped its tax on wine and later held a record-breaking wine auction. In January a Chinese company bought a Bordelais chateau called Latour-Laguens, the first acquisition of its kind by a Chinese firm.
No visitor has generated as much attention as the critic Robert Parker, who made his inaugural visit to China this year. In May, British wine merchant Berry Bros. & Rudd released a report predicting that, in 50 years, China will be the world’s leading supplier of wine, including Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay to rival French offerings.
China’s 400 producers already rank the nation as the world’s sixth largest producer, ahead of Chile and South Africa. Outside China, however, there is little knowledge of the country’s brands, which include Dragon’s Hollow, Grace Vineyard, Great Wall, Chateau Junding, Catai and China Silk.
The greatest challenge for Chinese producers, however, is not quantity.
“The joke about Chinese wine was always, ‘Have you tried Chinese wine — leaded or unleaded?’ ” said Jim Boyce, a Canadian who lives in Beijing and runs Grapewallofchina .com, a well-read blog covering the nation’s growing market and production.
Indeed, much of China’s wines are unsatisfying to Western palates. “Very, very thin, not quite clean, red Bordeaux,” critic Jancis Robinson wrote of what she tasted on early visits in 2002 and 2003. Since then Chinese wines have been slow to improve because high-end buyers look abroad, while the rest of the market has so little experience with wine that it is content to buy the cruder offerings.
