A Short History of Wine in China: 9,000 Years in Six Chapters

Ask most Europeans where wine was born and they will point to Georgia, Persia or the Mediterranean. Few would point to China. Yet the story of wine in China is older, stranger and more surprising than almost anyone expects. Here it is, in six chapters.

1. The oldest "wine" on Earth (c. 7000 BC)

In the Neolithic village of Jiahu, in today's Henan province, archaeologists found pottery jars around 9,000 years old. When scientists led by Dr Patrick McGovern of the Penn Museum analysed the residues inside, they found traces of a fermented drink made from rice, honey and hawthorn fruit and/or wild grapes.

It was not wine as we know it: more a cross between beer, mead and fruit wine. But it is still recognised as the oldest chemical evidence of an alcoholic drink ever found anywhere. The first chapter of the world's wine story may well have been written in China.

2. Grapes along the Silk Road (2nd century BC)

China's native wild grapes were small and sour. The vine that makes wine, Vitis vinifera, came from the West.

In the 2nd century BC, the Han emperor sent an envoy, Zhang Qian, deep into Central Asia. In the valley of Ferghana he found people who made wine from grapes and stored it for years. The Han court brought back vines, and grapes began their slow journey east, along the same routes that carried silk west. This is the road our name comes from.

3. The Tang dynasty: wine becomes poetry (7th–9th century)

Under the Tang dynasty, China was open, cosmopolitan and curious. In 640 AD the empire conquered the oasis kingdom of Gaochang, near today's Turpan, famous for its grapes. According to tradition, Emperor Taizong brought back both vines and the local method of making wine, and made it himself at court.

Wine entered poetry. The poet Wang Han opened one of the most famous verses of the era with a line every Chinese student still knows: 葡萄美酒夜光杯, "Fine grape wine in cups that glow at night." Thirteen centuries later, Chinese wine lovers still quote it with a raised glass.

4. Centuries in the shadow

After the Tang, grape wine never disappeared, but it remained a rare luxury. Rice wine (huangjiu) and, later, the powerful grain spirit baijiu became China's everyday drinks. Grape wine was the drink of foreign courts, border oases and the occasional emperor with exotic tastes. It never vanished completely: in the 13th century, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo still described vineyards and wine around Taiyuan, in Shanxi.

5. 1892: the pioneer of Yantai

The modern story starts with one man. In 1892 Zhang Bishi, a Chinese entrepreneur who had made his fortune in Southeast Asia, founded the Changyu winery in Yantai, on the coast of Shandong. He imported European vines, hired a European winemaker and dug deep cellars. Changyu is still one of China's largest wine companies today.

6. The modern wave (1980–today)

When China opened its economy around 1980, wine came back. The first modern brands were born: Dynasty, founded in 1980 in Tianjin as a joint venture with the French group Rémy Martin, and Great Wall, created in 1983 by the state food group COFCO in Hebei. At the same time, the first modern vineyards were planted at the foot of the Helan Mountains, and from the late 1990s the government and investors turned with growing ambition to this dry, sunny, empty land: Ningxia.

The turning point came in London, in September 2011. At the Decanter World Wine Awards, the Jia Bei Lan 2009 from Helan Qingxue, a small Ningxia winery, won an International Trophy for Bordeaux-style reds, competing against wines from all over the world. For the first time, a Chinese wine had won at the highest level. Nobody in the wine world could ignore China anymore.

Since then, the great names of French wine have followed: Moët Hennessy with Ao Yun in the Himalayan foothills of Yunnan, and the Rothschilds of Château Lafite in Shandong. Meanwhile, a new generation of family estates is building China's own wine identity, with grapes like Marselan and styles that owe nothing to anyone.

In one sentence

China may have made the first fermented drink in history, kept grape wine on the margins for centuries, and is now, quietly and quickly, writing one of the most exciting new chapters in the world of wine.