It was a wonderful experience to judge the recent Ningxia Wine Tasting Competition, when with a large panel of international and Chinese judges, I worked my way through 64 of the region’s wines. The wines entered into this event covered a wide range of varieties and several recent vintages. The three best wines as determined on the day will receive generous cash prizes from the Ningxia Government, so there was real intent behind the event.
Despite the wide circulation of photo of me looking somewhat aghast at a wine I was tasting at the show, I have been and remain a huge supporter of Chinese wine. I rated the Jia Bei Lan Reserve 2009 from Helan Qing Xue at 96 point in December 2011, well in advance of any awards it has since collected. I am excited about the potential for wine in China, including Ningxia.
Ningxia’s regional Government has very ambitious plans for its wine industry, which already encompasses something over 33,000 ha of vines. If recent coverage in the China Daily newspaper is to be believed, it expects to see this figure grow to a mind-blowing 180,000 ha by 2020. Ningxia, still a relatively unknown region in the Chinese wine market, is already the fastest-growing wine region in the world. As a regular visitor to China, I am used to things happening big and fast, but this would be something else! Especially in a region that has made a small amount of very good wine but receives but 200mm of rainfall each year and whose summer can turn into winter in something faster than a heartbeat.
Ningxia’s Government also expects its wine industry to become one of the most significant – indeed perhaps the most significant – businesses in its region. This is startling indeed, since again using figures published in the China Daily, its stated ambition is for Ningxia’s wine industry to be worth 200 billion RMB per year. To put this into perspective, the entire Australian wine industry, which crushed 1.8 million tonnes of fruit in 2013 is worth about 25 billion RMB at wholesale annually. In other words, Ningxia’s Government expects its wine industry to be eight times the value of Australia’s (again, based on figures that were repeated in two issues of the China Daily) within a short time. That will not happen easily.
The regional government is also the major stakeholder behind the Ningxia Wine Tasting Competition, and has previously invested in imaginative international competitions in which winemakers were paired with local producers to make batches of wine for evaluation, and also promotion. A great idea, and one that has indeed brought some fine international winemaking talent into the region.
However, as a judge of the recent competition, I do have some concerns, since in any competition it is essential that the competitors are able to put their best foot forward. That is needed even if only so the judges can make their best possible decision, which will doubtless influence future trends in production as well as consumer preference. And there’s no doubting the influence here, or the importance attached by local producers to this competition.
The chosen venue for the event was a cave high in the mountains above Ningxia and close to Helan Mountain. From all appearances it was once a mine, and it meandered long into the mountainside, deep into solid rock. Instrumentation along what I assume was a shaft or service shaft showed a consistent relative humidity of 91% or greater, with temperatures declining from around 4 degrees Celsius near the opening to 1 degree as you went further inside the mountain; numbers that suggest that labels of any wine cellared there will become covered in mould and that wines kept there will age at snail-like pace. In other words, a place in which wine is best not to be stored. Interestingly, plans are indeed for wine storage and tourism in this place, which is only to be accessed up a long, winding road from the foot of the mountains, and which is a significant drive from the nearby city of Yinchuan.
A mere day before the tasting took place the anteroom for the ‘cave’ was completed. It’s a delightful and airy space, with pleasing light and atmosphere. It is however a cold room, cold enough to require all within to wear coats over their coats just to combat an ambient temperature in the range of 7-8 degrees Celsius. That suited us, to a degree, but since the wines were unable to receive similar benefit, it did not suit them at all.
Wolf Blass was the first person in Australian wine to figure that when wine shows are judged in cold spaces that fruit is less important to the judges than oak. Simply put, wines cannot express their fruit in cold environs – as witnessed frequently when they’re plucked from cellars at between 14-17 degrees Celsius to then unfold their true qualities and perfume as they emerge from the bottle or decanter into room temperature. Wolf Blass won three consecutive Jimmy Watson Trophies at the Melbourne Wine Show on the basis of this knowledge – each of which were judged in a room of around 11 degrees Celsius. Wolf was the only person in town who figured the more oak, the better, since fruit was entirely compromised in cold conditions. So he oaked his wines more than the rest, and the rest is history.
We judged wines served at around 8 degrees in Ningxia, even though the organisers of the tasting, the talented and highly qualified staff of RVF China magazine, had voiced their concerns over the temperature in the room. Speaking personally, but also on behalf of several of our very eminent tasting group, this provided us with a challenge that we found impossible to meet. On one hand the wines were stripped of fruit as a result of their serving temperature – something that we could not see through – while on the other hand we were evaluating wines in conditions that only Eskimos would duplicate. Nothing was relevant to the consumer experience.
The inevitable result of this process is that we were not able to rate the wines on their true quality, and that to a person we’re convinced that the wrong wines are likely to end up the winners. And as I have suggested earlier, this is unlikely to help an industry that is under such pressure to duplicate itself in scale, time and again.
The following day, at Helan Qing Xue, I was able to taste several of the same wines from this producer again, in normal conditions. The differences in the wines were spectacular.
Ningxia’s wine industry should consider itself blessed that it has a regional government so passionately concerned and committed to its success. The drive and encouragement the government provides is something that no Australian wine producer will ever experience. Over the centuries, however, successful governments have learned that wine is a complicated and particular beast.
Yet there remains a disconnect between what Ningxia’s government is attempting to do and the agricultural, commercial and wine-savvy sensibilities that those with experience in the wine industry can relate to. There needs to be a reset here – or else neither the government nor the industry will meet their own objectives. How could this happen? Through dialogue – through both parties becoming closer together and through this process better understanding the needs and ambitions of the other. It’s a common human story.
There’s a great deal of wine wisdom in and around Ningxia, from deeply experienced sources engaged with trade, academia and business. The fundamental expertise needed to see it reach its potential does actually exist and I know the people who can deliver. This wine region, full of undoubted but at this stage largely unfulfilled potential, needs a steady and realistic set of expectations and delivery.
Five years is a short time in wine. If expansion is too rushed there’s a predictable series of outcomes – wrong varieties, wrong clones, diseased planting material and lack of environmental understanding to name but a few.
The small number of excellent wines that have emerged in the last few years from Ningxia have fuelled the expectations and dreams of many – from very significant investors, to practitioners and to government. However, some of the expectations I have witnessed are sheer fantasy. With the passing of each and every day it becomes more apparent that all involved in Ningxia’s wine industry need to make sure they’re dreaming the same dreams.
