I got an email recently from a friend in France who had just lunched with the famous but reclusive Meursault producer Jean-François Coche of Coche-Dury. Could I get hold of some Chinese wine, he pleaded, because Jean-François is extremely keen to taste it. I encounter this sort of curiosity all over the wine world now because China is already the fifth-biggest producer of wine globally and yet Chinese wine is rarely seen outside its borders. Exports may be minimal at the moment but as production volumes continue to grow, it is likely that Chinese wine will increasingly find its way to palates more sophisticated than the average Chinese ones and its quality intrigues many of us wine professionals.
I’ve been visiting China about every two years since 2001 and every time I try to go to a different wine region and taste as many Chinese wines as possible recommended by trustworthy fellow wine lovers living there. I didn’t detect much qualitative progress during the first decade of this century (unlike the dramatic increase in the quantity of wine produced) but in recent years the number of entirely respectable reds has grown at an impressive rate. While in Asia last month I was asked when I thought China would produce world-class wine. I said I thought that on the basis of what I had tasted so far it would probably be within five to 10 years but added semi-facetiously, in a reference to the extraordinary speed with which the Chinese tackle their objectives, that in practice it would probably be three to six years. (This wound up as a headline in the Shanghai press that I had confidently predicted China would be producing great wine in three years.)
There is still a great deal of very ordinary, often faulty, sometimes extremely questionable liquid on sale in China labelled as wine. The blending of local ferment with wine imported in bulk is notorious and some of what is on sale is not even grape-derived. I’m constantly amazed that the Chinese don’t complain more about the thin, fruitless reds that make up the great bulk of the “Chinese wine” on offer. But what I’m interested in when I visit are the wines with real ambition.