We haven't found our terroirs yet," the Chinese wine critic Winnie Wang told me when I met her not long ago in Beijing. I had come in search of that most elusive thing: Chinese wine that won't kill you on the spot. Her honesty was of a kind that would give a Napa winemaker an infarction. "Even so," Wang went on, "China has been making wine for 5,000 years, perhaps longer than any other culture." But do you know anyone who has ever drunk Dragon Seal or Great Wall?
More than anything, it was the dead hand of communism that prevented Chinese wine from flourishing in the past century. But a new crop of wineries, many of them joint ventures with Western capitalists, are now busy scouring the country's 3.7 million square miles for those elusive terroirs. The potential payoff is huge: a market of untold millions of new wine drinkers. And, perhaps, some great new wines, too — or, if not great, then at least palatable, enticing, and suggestive of better things to come.
As Wang and I and a few others made our way through a darkened building at the poetically named Sino-French Demonstration Vineyard to a tiny lab, the winemaker, Li Demei, apologized for the primitive conditions. The winery is struggling financially, he told me. He said it was hard to get decent distribution, and even harder to get decent press. The Chinese wine scene was still dominated by domestic mega-brands made by food corporations with little interest in making the handcrafted stuff. Tasteless, dry table wines like the aforementioned Great Wall, which one sees in every Beijing supermarket, dominate the Chinese market and exert a stranglehold on the budding but still confused Chinese palate, which tends to favor traditional (and cheaper) rice wines and beer.
I would have to admit that in the depths of a Chinese winter, the Sino-French Demonstration is not the most enticing winery one could imagine. Scoured by sub-zero Mongolian winds, the winters here are so cold that the vines remain buried until March. The winery is a joint venture with the French Ministry of Agriculture and it looks like a piece of neglected Le Corbusier — a thicket of cement angles and empty pools. There are no gilded signs for the Sino-French and no lush imagery of happy revelers cavorting among gigantic grape clusters. The nearest villages are mean and lean, and the local booze is more typically made from rice.
But Jim Boyce, a friend of Wang's and Beijing's premier wine blogger, is convinced that this unpromisingly named establishment is where Chinese wine will soon be reborn or, depending on your perspective, born. He should know. Boyce conducts tastings, writes criticism, attacks the Chinese trade journals, and travels all over China searching for new wines and liqueurs that no one else, it seems, has heard of. With little prior experience with wine in the West, he is the Kermit Lynch of the Middle Kingdom. (Though, unlike Lynch, he is not yet an importer.)
