The Best American Travel Writing 2015

by Andrew McCarthy

  In fact, grape wine was first grown commercially in China in 1892, using vines imported from California, when it was marketed to foreign residents and the first rising class of Westernized Chinese. It was a strong beginning: in 1915, the winery, Changyu, won a string of gold medals at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, and in the wild and decadent 1930s, sultry movie star Hu Die (“the Chinese Marilyn Monroe”) promoted it in Shanghai. After a long period of stagnation following the Communist Revolution, production of wine began expanding after the country’s embrace of capitalism in the 1980s. According to Vinexpo, an international wine and spirits trade group, China is now the world’s eighth largest wine producer and will be the sixth largest by 2016, surpassing Australia and Chile. But the emphasis has long been on quantity rather than quality, with enormous state-owned companies like Great Wall and Dynasty churning out cheap wines for locals with industrial speed, often using grapes imported from Argentina and South Africa.

  For a glimpse of an old-school winery, I make the pilgrimage one drizzly afternoon to Chateau Changyu AFIP, located in a rural district an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Beijing. It’s the descendant of China’s pioneer 1892 company and now part of a conglomerate whose scale can only send a shudder down the spine of the average oenophile. The winery isn’t hard to spot, since it boasts a reproduction French chateau, its turrets rising above the verdant vineyards. The sense of Disney fantasy only increases as I enter part of the winery complex called Foreign Town, a faux European village complete with medieval church, a store where Chinese newlyweds are having their photos printed on wine labels, and a shop mysteriously called the Holy Grail Factory—all utterly deserted but awaiting busloads of tourists.

  Accompanying me is the Beijing-based wine blogger Jim Boyce, who has covered the local wine industry for more than eight years and has been a consistent advocate for the boutique wines of Shanxi and Ningxia. Boyce, who has the slightly disheveled appearance and acerbic wit of Newman from Seinfeld, is having trouble readjusting his palate to China’s pollution after a trip to the bucolic Sonoma Valley. For days after his return to Beijing, he jokes, the bouquet of every wine, good or bad, was vaguely like smog, the first sip rather like lead. (“And the hangovers are worse here,” he mourns.)

  A guide named Nan Xia leads us into the château to inspect the bunkerlike cellar, where private wine collections are stored behind Arthurian coats of arms inscribed with Chinese calligraphy, and a Wine Culture Museum, which includes a photo of Changyu wines being served to President Obama at a state dinner. (“The closest thing to an assassination attempt yet,” Boyce murmurs.) The tour ends up in a cavernous tasting room, where a young sommelier, Wong Fuyue, hesitantly serves a 2008 Chardonnay at room temperature to the Muzak version of the Titanic theme song. “I would describe this wine as anemic,” Boyce notes. “There’s not much nose. But at least it’s clean.” When told that it sells for more than $100 a bottle, Boyce almost drops his glass. “I can buy a Chilean bottle for $12 at the supermarket—and it’s better! Why would I buy this wine?”

  Wong Fuyue grins and turns up his palms. “I don’t know!” Nan Xia is unperturbed by the bad review. “Can we all take a photo together?”

  After visiting Changyu, it is easy to understand why the arrival of smaller producers causes such relief and excitement among China’s wine lovers. Some experts believe that the sheer novelty of the situation is leading to overenthusiasm. “A few years ago, Chinese wine was terrible,” Boyce says. “Now it’s not. But the industry is still in its infancy,” he cautions.

  The boutique wines are expensive—thanks to their small-scale production and China’s high transport costs—retailing from $40 to $80. And production in some vineyards is minuscule. But the quality of the boutique wines is now undeniable—the country has the soil, the climate, and an aptitude for the technical aspects of production—and the range of domestic wines is expanding, like so much in China, at an accelerating pace.

  The rise of boutique wineries is just one element turning the wine world on its head; another is the recent boom in international wine imports to China. At the luxury end of the market, the shifting tastes of China’s superwealthy are now dictating prices at auction houses around the world. Hong Kong led the way, abolishing the tax on imported wine in 2008 and becoming the world’s No. 1 wine auction market by 2011. “People say it’s a miracle, but it’s not,” says Gregory De’eb, general manager of Crown Wine Cellars, a fine-wine storage facility housed in a World War II ammunition depot leased from the Hong Kong government. For decades, Hong Kong’s wealthy had been storing their wines in cellars overseas. “In 2008, the floodgates opened,” De’eb says. “There was forty years’ worth of wine knowledge, forty years’ worth of stocks, and a huge amount of capital. All the building blocks were in place.”

  This wine expertise is now percolating through the mainland. “China started late, but it’s catching up quickly,” says Simon Tam, head of wine at Christie’s in China. “In just a few years, people have reached a very high level of appreciation. Chinese clients used to talk only about prices and vintages, not what was in the bottle. Now the important thing is not how much money you have but how you express it in wine knowledge.” Tim Weiland, former general manager of the exclusive Aman at Summer Palace in the emperor’s onetime retreat in Beijing, suggests that the image of China’s wealthy class as crass nouveau riche—mixing expensive Bordeaux with Coca-Cola, for example—is entirely out of date. “The nouveaux riches of ten years ago are now the old rich,” he says. “They have homes in Switzerland and Aspen, they’re incredibly sophisticated and well traveled—much more well traveled than I am—and they know their wines.”

  Foreign importers are eager to expand their foothold far beyond the luxury market, as an estimated 200 million potential consumers in China’s growing middle class are exposed to wine for the first time. China is already the world’s fifth largest wine-consuming country. At fine restaurants in Beijing and Shanghai, where Chinese diners make up the majority, customers regularly pore over wine lists and discuss options in detail with the sommelier. “Eight years ago, Chinese people were not confident about wine,” says Jackie Song, former wine steward at the Mediterranean restaurant Sureño, in Beijing’s trendy Opposite House hotel. “All they would drink was French, especially Burgundy. But now they try Spanish wines, Chilean, Greek.”

  The number of Chinese-born sommeliers has increased exponentially over the past five years, with great career rewards for the most dedicated. Jerry Liao, who won the China National Sommelier Competition in 2013, had barely tasted grape wine a decade ago when he began working in high-end restaurants. “I was basically forced to learn,” he says. “Otherwise I would have lost my job.” Once he discovered his talent, Liao rose quickly through the ranks and is now hotel sommelier at the new Jing An Shangri-La in Shanghai. Even more meteoric has been the rise of Yang Lu, a gifted young sommelier who became the wine director of the entire Shangri-La hotel empire in 2012. “I’m in the first wave of Chinese sommeliers,” he says. “We all realize that we’re opinion leaders. We feel a lot of responsibility. And there’s a lot of pressure.”

  Wine is also being offered at more social events in China. When I was invited to a dinner party at the Beijing studio-residence of artist Wang Mai and his wife, Liu Chunfeng, joining poets, pop stars, gallery owners, and curators in a warehouse filled with sculptures and giant oil paintings, the evening began with Prosecco and moved on to Australian Shiraz to complement the Sichuan hot-pot dinner, in which morsels of meat and vegetables are dropped into boiling oil. Wang remembered first trying sweet Chinese white wine at age 10 but has so far been unable to sample the new boutique wines. “The only Chinese wines I can afford are almost undrinkable,” he says. “I’ll stick with Barossa Valley.”

  Grace Vineyard is a model for the Chinese wine industry’s potential,” says Tam of Christie’s, pointing to its consistently good results over the past decade. Grace has an annual production o
f 2 million bottles, specializing in robust reds, with a few fine whites. Next year, Grace is even releasing the first Chinese sparkling wine, a blanc de blanc.

  But on China’s wild frontier of taste, the artisanal success stories are nothing if not eccentric. Even the birth of Grace Vineyard sounds like the premise of a reality-TV show. “We’re considered a miracle in the industry,” says Judy Chan, the CEO of the family-owned company, whose father moved from mainland China to Hong Kong in the 1970s after the Cultural Revolution. “We had no experience in wine, no connections, no distribution network.” Chan’s businessman father, Chun Keung Chan, purchased 150 acres of farmland in Shanxi in 1997 to fulfill a fantasy of owning a winery, and in 2002, as the first vintage was hitting the market, he handed over the reins to his spectacularly unqualified 24-year-old daughter. A psychology graduate who had recently quit Goldman Sachs, Chan had experienced wine only as a teenager on holiday in Burgundy, where she drank two glasses of red and fell asleep on the couch. Her arrival in the backwaters of rural Shanxi was a culture shock, as she was collected from the airport by the surly local vintners, who were suspicious of her youth, gender, and evident inexperience. “When they mentioned Cabernet Sauvignon, I didn’t even know what they were talking about,” she recalls. “But I BS-ed my way through—a skill I had learned from Goldman Sachs.”

  She had to learn almost every aspect of the industry from scratch, Chan tells me when we meet at a Michelin-starred Hong Kong restaurant, Bo Innovation, which serves a range of Grace wines with its molecular Chinese cuisine. A local designer created Grace’s first label, Chan says, but “it looked like soy sauce. We had to beg people to take it.” She hired an Australian consultant, Ken Murchison, and to improve quality, they uprooted half the original vines, which horrified government officials (“In China, everything has to get bigger and bigger!”). Even marketing the unfamiliar product had its comic elements. In 2003, Grace opened its first retail store in Fuzhou, where Chan’s family originated. “For sixteen days, not a single person walked in,” Chan recalls. When one finally did, the four shopgirls rushed him. “He fled! They scared the poor guy to death.”

  The breakthrough came when hotels in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing began to serve Grace wines—the Peninsula chain even commissioned a special label. The initial appeal was to foreigners who enjoyed the novelty, but the new wave of Chinese middle-class diners has now become the majority of the market. “A lot of Chinese people are proud of our wines and want to show them off,” says Chan, who admits there is still a deep prejudice against Chinese wine overseas. But if the quality is consistent, China can overcome its poor image, she suggests, as New World wines have. “People forget that when Californian and Australian wines first came out, consumers were very, very skeptical. The French looked down their noses for decades at the Napa Valley.”

  Wariness of the MADE IN CHINA label is even more severe when it comes to food, thanks to the scandals that have become a staple of international news since 2008, when baby formula tainted with toxic melamine killed 6 infants and sickened 300,000 more. In 2013, tens of thousands of chickens were slaughtered for fear of bird flu, and a crime ring was arrested for passing off rat and mink meat as lamb.

  The small producers of artisanal Western delicacies are so far untouched by such scandals. Consider the rise of Chinese caviar. Siberian sturgeon was first imported in 1997 to a research station on the Amur River, on the Russian border. A visiting French scientist suggested harvesting it. Today, China accounts for 20 percent of world output, filling the gap left by overfishing and poaching in the Caspian Sea. The majority is exported to the United States, Europe, Japan, and even Russia, and it’s served in first-class air cabins and sold under the esteemed Petrossian label. But it still struggles to overcome the made-in-China stigma.

  Swiss-born chef Florian Trento of Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel recalls being deeply apprehensive when his counterpart in Shanghai invited him to try the caviar. “I said, ‘Really? Chinese caviar?’ He said, ‘Trust me!’ And it was fantastic.” Now two types of Chinese caviar are on the Peninsula menu in Hong Kong. “Often we do blind tastings because Chinese products have such a bad rap,” Trento says. “Diners are very, very surprised.” He sees it as a template for what is possible in China. “The quality is excellent, the industry is well regulated, the farms are sustainable,” he says. “We are very keen to support it.” Still, even in Beijing markets, Chinese caviar is sold with Cyrillic labels to look Russian. “In the long term, the Chinese have to fix things. There’s been one scandal after another. How much more can you destroy your reputation?”

  Because of their size, most top restaurants and luxury hotels import ingredients from overseas—beef from Australia, produce from California, mozzarella from Italy. But in the former French Concession of Shanghai, one upscale restaurant, Madison, has gone to the opposite extreme and makes a point of serving only locally sourced produce. The menu, although technically New American, reads like a lesson in Chinese geography. There’s smoked trout from the coastal waters of Fujian, pan-roasted chicken from the mountains of Anhui, Wagyu tenderloin from the fields of Dalian. The truffles for the hollandaise and morels for a huangjiu sauce are sourced from the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan, while ingredients for side dishes such as potato puree with garlic scapes are gathered from small farms near Beijing.

  “You can’t say that China doesn’t have great ingredients,” says the chef-owner, Austin Hu, who moved with his family to Shanghai when he was eight, studied at the French Culinary Institute in New York City, and apprenticed at Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern. “There’s a huge amount going on out there. In fact, Chinese produce does not have to be inferior; it can be better.” One employee works full-time tracking down produce across the Chinese countryside, meeting farmers and fishermen outside the industrialized food system. “It’s a lot of work,” Hu admits when we meet at the bar of his softly lit, SoHo-style space, a refuge from the city’s chaos. “When you take the extra step to find the little guys, it can be a revelation.” He has discovered small, pesticide-free farms cropping up, with names such as Little Donkey Farm, which sounds as though it was transplanted from Brooklyn. He’s met an independent beer maker in Inner Mongolia who sold his brew in 100-crate lots (“We send a guy up there to negotiate and truck it ourselves to Shanghai”) and has come across a delectable salt-cured ham from Yunnan. (“I’ll put it up against any type of prosciutto.”) One small producer near Shanghai was even producing hand-pulled burrata, employing teams of women who once made dumplings by hand. (“Their finger skills are great.”)

  Hu says that the homegrown concept has been a hard sell. “Some customers, when they discover it’s all locally sourced, will stand up and leave the restaurant. I tell them they’re being closed-minded. I say, ‘Give it a shot!’ But it’s hard to break the mindset.” Another problem is the relatively high cost. “Chinese people are pretty value sensitive,” says Hu. “They praise a restaurant that is xìng jià bi, good value. These local ingredients are not cheap, so it’s a risk for people to break out of their regular eating habits.” But as concern about food quality mounts in China, customers are becoming more prepared to pay extra to know their food is safe. “During the bird-flu scare, we sold more chicken than ever,” says Hu’s cousin, Garrett, who helps run Madison. “People trust our sourcing.”

  It’s a strange twist that every new food scandal bolsters the sales of artisanal Western foods, even in the most difficult gastro frontier, cheese. Many Chinese are lactose intolerant and find the rich milk product difficult to digest, but Liu Yang, one of the first to produce French artisanal cheese in China, says that while his first customers in 2009 were Western expats, they are now outnumbered by locals. “Parents want their kids to have safe, real food,” he says. “When they come to my shop, I explain where my milk comes from and how the cheese is made.” For most, a visit is a totally new experience. “I give them a tasting platter and talk over tea about how to appreciate the flavors.”

&
nbsp; With his close-cropped hair and horn-rimmed spectacles, Yang looks more like an intellectual from the 1960s than a hipster gourmand, and his factory, where a half-dozen women in hairnets work over shiny industrial vats, is improbably located in a row of shops in an outer Beijing suburb. His own introduction to quality cheeses began slowly, Yang explains, when he moved to France to study business management 13 years ago. “Like most Chinese people, I had only ever tasted processed yellow cheese,” he says. It wasn’t until he moved to Corsica in 2005 that he had his conversion, when he learned that his neighbor handcrafted his own cheese and was willing to share his experience.

  On his return to Beijing, Yang tried his hand at cheese-making using local dairy. Not surprisingly, he could not replicate the exact flavors: French cows tend to graze on grass in the mountains, so an herbal flavor infuses their milk, while Chinese cows feed on grain at industrialized farms. (There is an organic dairy in the region, but its prices are prohibitive, Yang says.) Even so, he was able to monitor his milk’s quality by buying direct, and he now gets milk from cows fed with grass in the countryside. Since opening his shop in 2009, he has expanded from his Roquefort-style Beijing Blue to six cheeses of varying richness and consistency, and he has just begun selling a goat cheese. “Food culture is very important to all Chinese people, and they are open to new tastes,” Yang says. “The rich and the poor go to restaurants regularly. Eating is the most enjoyable thing in life.” And the cultural leap is not as great as imagined. “We eat fermented tofu, so we can eat fermented cheese.”