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JR's notes:

China is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world - and its thirst for wine is growing alongside. The sheer size of the country, its range of climates and altitudes, soils and exposures, make it a prime candidate for development. there are those pundits who say that China will dominate the world wine economy by 2050. This is how it looked in May, 1998, in DECANTER magazine. The DECANTER website is at www.decanter.com

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LETTER FROM CHINA

John Radford reports from the province of Hebei

This winter (1998/9) a new vineyard will be planted in this east-facing, coastal province of mainland China which promises to change the perception of 'Chinese wine' once and for all. Perhaps it's odd that a nation which has produced one of the world's greatest food cultures has, until now, barely scratched the surface of its wine-producing potential, but that's all about to change: those of us who remember the dreaded 'Peking White' of Chinese restaurants passim may have cause for rejoicing.

Average per capita consumption in this country of more than a billion people is currently only 0.2 litres (that's about one-and-a-half glasses of wine per person per year), and as the years of austerity under hard-line Communist rule give way (albeit slowly) to a more enlightened future, the market potential is incalculable. The Chinese love of rice 'wine' and ardent sprits seems to be fading, and the world's unquenchable enthusiasm for Chinese cookery is being reciprocated with an increasing interest within the country for what we might describe as 'European-style' wines.

There have been Chinese wines before, of course, both native (the Peking White) and as the result of joint ventures with French companies - notably Rémy-Martin and Pernod-Ricard - and those from the US and Canada - particularly Seagram's and Hiram Walker. However, the latest developments in Hebei are the first to establish a major vineyard in a prime site with almost unlimited expansion potential, and the man behind the venture is Miguel A. Torres, Chief Executive of the Torres Group, based in Vilafranca del Penedès, in the DO Penedès, province of Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain.

Torres wines from Catalunya, Chile and the US have been on sale within China for some considerable time as part of a joint venture with the American distributor Montrose International, and there is a newly-established Torres bottling-plant in China producing some 5,000 cases of Torres Spanish wines as well as around 100 from the USA and Chile. Indeed, the Beijing Review reported last summer that Sangredetoro 'is currently a popular drink in posh bars and night-clubs in Beijing and Shanghai'. The locally-bottled Spanish wine is called Jaime Torres and reached the market for the first time in February, 1998. It sells for about 85 Yuan (£6.50; $10.90) a bottle .

Hebei province is on China's east coast, and the new vineyards are being planted on sites around the 39th parallel - the same latitude as Valencia in Spain, and Sacramento in California. The climate is hot-continental (up to 36ºC in the hottest part of the year) and ideal for ripening grapes: the vineyards are likely to be planted overlooking the East China Sea to take advantage of cooling offshore breezes. In the past, the area has made its living growing cotton and wheat, as well as mining coal, steel working and heavy manufacturing. Growing vines is a new departure but one which fits the local soils and climate, as well as the burgeoning market for wine within China itself.

The new company, rather cumbersomely named 'Zhangjiakou Great Wall Torres Winery Co. Ltd.' is 60% owned by Torres with the rest split between Montrose Distribution and the Zhangjiakou Great Wall company, which is owned outright by the Chinese government. Certainly, there has been no stinting the investment: Pts 100m (£394,000; $658,000) has been committed in the first year with a five-year total of Pts 460m (£1.8m; $3m) and, if early results are a success, there is likely to be more.

From a viticultural point of view, The initial vineyard will cover 25 ha around the town of Shasheng, in the north of the province, expanding to 50 ha over the next five years. Rootstocks, grafting, vine-density, pruning and training will be in accordance with Torres' own exhaustive researches over the past twenty years, and we may see something of a 'New World' style developing in this most ancient of world cultures.

Taking advantage of the similarities between the climates of Shasheng and the Penedès, where the headquarters of the Torres organisation is based, Don Miguel plans to major on early-maturing varietals such as Tempranillo, Merlot and Garnacha Tinta with a projected mature-vineyard production of 20-30,000 cases of twelve bottles (1,800-2,700 hl). The first wines, which will be jovenes in Spanish parlance (i.e. without any oak-ageing), are expected to reach the market in the spring of the year 2003, with oak-matured versions (if these prove to be viable) one, two and three years later than that.

Quality-control will be up to the usual Torres standards and it seems likely that this new venture will only be the first of many to exploit China's natural climatic advantages and a market which seems to resemble that of the UK and USA in the 1960s - full of potential, boundless interest and increasing enthusiasm.

The only remaining unanswered question is how we will describe these 'New World' style wines, produced in one of the most venerable civilisations of our 'Old World'. We have until the year 2003 to decide.

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