I found this recent article by Ian D’Agata on a new winery in Yunnan province that will soon be forced to move and basically change even the grapes it uses to be quite eye-opening.
Ian writes for a Chinese public, so I always approach his articles on China with the view that a lot of the insights need to be inferred or read between the lines because, as we all know, he can’t outright make any critical comments regarding the government or it could cost him his business.
Here it is. I’d appreciate everyone’s thoughts. And also, has anyone tried any Chinese wines?
Agreed. It’s not even the first time. I have a piece of 18th century wall art from (what I imagine to have been a small village’s) Buddhist temple destroyed as they were building the Three Gorges dam.
Still interesting how they’re going to even go to Syrahs now. And left unsaid is where the villagers are being relocated.
Certainly it seems Merlot wasn’t working. (Even if I found the assertion that it doesn’t work in China too much of a generalization given the size of China.)
NV Gansu Mogao Industrial Development Co. Cabernet Sauvignon- China, Gansu (5/31/2018)
Jonesing for red wine after 2 weeks in dongbei and xibei regions of China. Picked up from a Vanguard grocer in Xi’an. Drinkable. Totally generic red wine flavors with a touch of acetic acid. (83 pts.)
Pretty interesting, that article (which was mostly about wine but included a paragraph about the village and vineyards being razed due to an upcoming hydroelectric dam) is now no longer available. In its place is a completely different article (dated November 24, 2021) also titled “The Yunnan Wine Files, Part 1” about a completely different winery in China.
Here is the cached version of the article, and here is the possibly offending part:
Château Roduit.
Château Roduit is one of the truly up and coming wineries of China, located in the Yunnan province, in the Mekong valley in Dequin County at the foot of the Meili Snow Mountains. The wines are bottled unfiltered and produced by an ecofriendly agriculture that is respectful of both the land and the local people, matured in clay pots at 3300 meters asl.
Yves Roduit is the Swiss owner of Château Roduit who founded the estate in 2017. He is a third-generation winemaker, as his family is from the Valais where they make wines such as Fendant du Valais and Petit Arvine. He also worked and trained with Patrick Léon, ex-winemaker of Mouton-Rothschild and other wineries, who instilled a love of terroir wines in him. Roduit came to China in 2014 with a friend very much into trekking and the visiting of Catholic villages and monasteries: during his travels, he realized that there was an outstanding terroir with which to make wines, a terroir that reminded him of his native Valais. Meeting his future wife Elena, a local girl from the village of Badong, sealed his love for China and his desire to remain in China. Roduit began working at Yunnan’s Xiaoling winery, but after two years there, he went out on his own, founding Château Roduit and made his first wine in 2018 (though he started making some wines that featured oak-aged in 2017; since 2018 no more oak has been used at the winery). Today he farms roughly three hectares of vines in the Fonshang village area close to the border with Tibet; these vineyards are actually about an hour car drive from the Badong village area where the wines are actually made. In the next three or four years however, Château Roduit will be making its wines from an entirely new vineyard source just below the village of Adong (where the famous LVMH-owned Ao Yun winery is located). This is because the Fonshang village and viticultural area will be destroyed as a result of the building of a huge hydroelectric dam that will flood the whole area (the villagers are being relocated over the course of the next five years). At the new site, that will be thirty hectares large, will feature 15 hectares planted to vines and the rest devoted to a brand new winery building and hotel complex. Given the characteristics of that area’s climate and soil he plans to plant Syrah and Petite Arvine (there’s the Swiss in Yves Roduit!). Beginning with the 2022 vintage, he will launch a Chardonnay wine from vines planted by the government forces roughly fifteen-twenty years ago in the Adong village area.
You know I was about to say that maybe it was a typo and that that’s Part 2. But then I checked and you’re totally right. Despite the current article mentioning the old one (where it says “see “Château Roduit” in Producer Insight, TerroirSense Wine Review, Friday, November 19, 2021”) there is no article with that date or topic that I can find on the website. Maybe Winnie the Pooh’s a WB lurker and didn’t take kindly to this thread.
My family said it does have a honey aroma and ruby red color but they disagreed with the almond aroma characterization. Love the name of the grape…frozen north red, lol!
