China, we know, is full of surprises, so why should anyone cock a brow when they learn that one of the grandest and most opulent Bordeaux-inspired winery constructions in the entire country – and one of its emerging high-end makers of cabernet – shares its name with a 15th generation Austrian maker of grüner veltliner?
Welcome to Chateau Changyu-Moser XV, a stunning €70m construction located in the now-sprawling region of Ningxia in China’s midwest. It’s the proud, ambitious project of Changyu, China’s oldest and largest wine producer. Its consultant winemaker is the energetic and engaging Lenz Moser, who since 2015 has been responsible for making its wines and taking them to the world. For ten years prior to then Moser had an interesting reciprocal relationship with Changyu – Changyu was fighting against the odds to sell his Austrian white wines in China while he was facing odds at least as challenging attempting to distribute their wines in Europe. They shared the challenges and became close, and during that time Moser became more involved in supporting Changyu’s winemaking team.
Then, in Moser’s words, Changyu’s chairman expressed frustration that the company hadn’t achieved a breakthrough after a decade of work in Europe, and both agreed that quality was the issue. So, explains Moser, the chairman asked why wouldn’t he make a wine from Changyu’s finest fruit to take to the world? The ambition was thus forged and the agreement was made – they would together make a wine worthy of one of China’s leading chateaux, but also a wine that sat comfortably amongst the world’s finest. ‘That’s what we’re aiming for’, he explains.
The first Changyu-Moser XV, which until January this year was the company’s premier red label, was released in 2015 from the 2013 vintage. Since he stepped into the lead role, Moser has refined the wine – the 2016 vintage that I have tasted married plushness and polish with genuine elegance and shape. Its backbone is very fine and supple, and with the small berries at his disposal, Moser expects to build more structure in future vintages. It’s a serious and truly fine wine that recently opened the eyes of the judging team at the Victorian Wines Show.
‘Ningxia is extremely dry and I’m working with the smallest cabernet fruit I have ever worked with’ says Moser. ‘We get great skin to juice ratio, and the thick skins have an abundance of flavour, colour and tannins. We’re at 1100 metres altitude and only get 150 mm of rain annually, so it’s all irrigated. The one and only challenge is that we need to bury the vines over winter, burying in November to around 30-40 cm of soil and unburying in March. We grow the canes at about 45 degrees to the vertical so at least we don’t have to bend them over 100% which would increase the chances of them snapping. Given all that, since about 2009 I’ve been convinced this might be the hotspot of winemaking in China.’
The upside to burying, however, is that you control the timing of budburst through the unburying process.
The estate has around 60 ha of cabernet sauvignon and access to another 200 ha of other nearby vineyards planted to cabernet sauvignon, merlot and shiraz amongst others. Overlying gravels from an ancient riverbed, the soils are around 60-70 cm of sandy loam and Moser is dead keen to ‘exploit their terroir and possibilities to the max’.
With only around 10-20 days of what you can really call autumn, Ningxia does present its unique challenges, which are typically related to achieving full late season ripening and true phenolic ripeness. Moser, however, while seeking to harvest as late as possible, reckons his fruit gets the same hang time or longer than that in Bordeaux, saying his biggest challenge was to get the vineyard workers to harvest after the Moon Festival holidays in early October. ‘We now get this mature taste, without any green notes and with mature tannins’, he says. ‘Sure, this comes at the price of higher alcohol, but we can fight this later on with less aggressive yeasts. The main thing is to get the phenolics right.’
In March just gone, Lenz Moser travelled the world to launch his new super-premium red, the ‘Purple Air Comes From The East’ 2016 Cabernet Sauvignon. At time of writing I have yet to taste this wine, which was limited to just 6300 bottles, so I can’t yet say if it’s on the same plane as the Shangri-La, LVMH’s Ao Yun or Helan Qing Xue’s ‘Baby Feet’ cabernet-based wines – the finest I have seen from China to date. But I’m thinking I’m in for a pleasant surprise.
Moser’s other piece of hot news? He’s now planting grüner veltliner.
