Wine in China

Wine (Chinese: 葡萄酒 pútáojiǔ lit. "grape alcohol") has a long history in China. Although long overshadowed by huangjiu (sometimes translated as "yellow wine") and the much stronger distilled spirit baijiu, wine consumption has grown dramatically since the economic reforms of the 1980s. China is now numbered among the top ten global markets for wine. Ties with French producers are especially strong, and Ningxia wines have received international recognition.

Use of wild grapes in production of alcoholic beverages has been attested at the Jiahu archaeological site (c. 7000 BC). High quality wine called qióng jiāng yù yè (Chinese: 瓊漿玉液) is mentioned in the Complete Tang Poems (Quan Tangshi), an 18th-century collection of around 50,000 poems compiled during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor. The phrase translates literally to "jade-like wine", but has an idiomatic meaning along the lines of "wonderful wine".

In 1995, a joint Sino-USA archaeology team including archaeologists from the Archeology Research Institute of Shandong University and American archaeologists under the leadership of Professor Fang Hui investigated the two archaeological sites 20 km to the northeast of Rizhao, and discovered the remnants of a variety of alcoholic beverages including grape wine, rice wine, mead, and several mixed beverages of these wines. Out of more than two hundred ceramic pots discovered at the sites, seven were specifically used for grape wine. Remnants of grape seeds were also discovered. If grape wine consumption was once present in Bronze Age China, however, it was replaced by consumption of a range of alcoholic beverages made from sorghum, millet, rice, and fruits such as lychee or Asian plum. In the 130s and 120s BC, a Chinese imperial envoy of the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) named Zhang Qian opened diplomatic relations with several Central Asian kingdoms, some of which produced grape wine. By the end of the second century BC, Han envoys had brought grape seeds from the wine-loving kingdom of Dayuan (Ferghana in modern Uzbekistan) back to China and had them planted on imperial lands near the capital Chang'an (near modern-day Xi'an in Shaanxi province). The Shennong Bencao Jing, a work on materia medica compiled in the late Han, states that grapes could be used to produce wine. In the Three Kingdoms era (220–280 AD), Wei emperor Cao Pi noted that grape wine "is sweeter than the wine made [from cereals] using ferments and sprouted grain. One recovers from it more easily when one has taken too much." Grapes continued to be grown in the following centuries, notably in the northwestern region of Gansu, but were not used to produce wine on a large scale. Wine thus remained an exotic product known by few people.

Not until the Tang dynasty (618–907) did the consumption of grape wines become more common. After the Tang conquest of Gaochang – an oasis state on the Silk Road located near Turfan in modern Xinjiang – in 641, the Chinese obtained the seeds of an elongated grape called "mare teat" (maru 馬乳) and learned from Gaochang a "method of wine making" (jiu fa 酒法). Several Tang poets versified on grape wine, celebrating wine from the "Western Regions" – that from Liangzhou was particularly noted – or from Taiyuan in Shanxi, the latter of which produced wine made from the "mare teat" grape. Meng Shen's 孟詵 Materia Dietetica (Shiliao Bencao 食療本草) and the government-sponsored Newly Compiled Materia Medica (Xinxiu bencao 新修本草; 652) record that Tang people produced naturally fermented wine.

China's "first modern winery" Changyu was founded in 1892 in Shandong province near the treaty port of Chefoo (now called Yantai) by the overseas Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Bishi.

French wine was the first foreign wine imported into China. In 1980, at the beginning of Chinese economic reform, Rémy Martin ventured into China to set up the first joint-venture enterprise in Tianjin: the Dynasty (Wang Chao, 王朝) Wine Ltd., which was also the second joint-venture enterprise in China. Over the years, the company developed over 90 brands of alcoholic beverages, and its products won numerous awards both domestically and abroad.

However, most of its products were exported abroad in the first two decades due to the low income of the local population, and it was not until after the year 2000 when the economic boom finally provided the domestic population with sufficient disposable income to support the domestic market; this relatively recent occurrence coincided with the increased popularity of French wine in China. Other companies, including China Great Wall Wine Co., Ltd, Suntime and Changyu, have also risen in prominence, and by 2005, 90% of grape wine produced was consumed locally.

Also, as globalization has brought China onto the international economic scene, so too has its winemaking industry come onto the international wine scene. China has a long tradition of the fermentation and distillation of Chinese wine, including all alcoholic beverages and not necessarily grape wine, but is one of the most recent participants in the globalization of wine that started years ago in Paris, when several countries such as Canada realized that they may be able to produce wines as good as most French wine.