Why Chinese Winemakers Bury Their Vines Every Winter

Visit a vineyard in Ningxia in December and you will see something strange: rows of wooden or stone posts, wires stretched between them, and nothing else. No trunks, no branches. A vineyard without vines.

The vines are there. They are underground, buried alive, waiting for spring.

Why bury a vine?

Grapevines are tough plants, but they have a limit. Chinese wine authority Professor Li Demei puts it at around -17°C: if winter temperatures regularly fall below that point, the vines need protection or they will die.

In most of northern China, winters are far colder. In Ningxia, temperatures can drop to -25°C, while icy, dry winds blow down from Mongolia. An exposed vine would freeze and dry out at the same time. Under a thick blanket of earth, it stays insulated, moist and alive.

That is why every year, millions of vines are buried across Xinjiang, Gansu, Ningxia, Shanxi, Hebei and the provinces of the north-east.

How do you put a vine to bed?

It is a precise ritual, repeated every year.

After the harvest, the vines are pruned hard and the canes are taken off the trellis wires. Leaves and fallen branches are cleared away, so the "bed" is clean and free of disease. In dry regions like Ningxia and Xinjiang, the vines get a deep drink of water about ten days before burial, enough to last the winter, but not so much that they rot.

Then, from late October to early November, each vine is bent down to the ground and covered with a thick layer of earth. In the past, this was all done by hand. Today, tractors with special ploughs do much of the work, but hands are still needed.

To make bending possible, vines in Ningxia are trained in a special shape: a short trunk that leans at an angle and then runs horizontally along the wire, like the Chinese character 厂. It is a shape designed for one purpose: to lie down every winter.

And in spring?

From March to mid-April, as the ground thaws, the whole process runs in reverse. The earth is carefully removed, the vines are lifted back onto the wires, and the season begins. Timing is critical: dig them out too early and a late frost can kill the young buds; too late and the buds may start to grow underground.

What it takes

Burying vines makes wine possible in places where it should not exist. But it takes a great deal of work.

• Labour. At Helan Qingxue, one of Ningxia's most famous estates, burial accounts for up to 30% of the yearly vineyard costs. It takes around 150 people a week and a half to bury 35 hectares.
• Space. Vines must be planted further apart, to leave enough soil for burying them.
• Stress. Being bent, buried and lifted every year damages the vine and can open the way to disease.
• Age. Every year of bending and digging takes its toll, and an old, thick trunk is hard to bend without damage. That is one reason why truly old vines are rare in northern China, while in Europe some vineyards are over a century old.

So when you open a fine Ningxia wine, remember: behind it is a vineyard that has to be buried and resurrected every single year.

Is China the only country that does this?

No, but it does it on a scale no one else does. Growers in a few other very cold places also protect their vines with soil in winter. But nowhere else are entire regions, tens of thousands of hectares, put to bed every November.

In one sentence

In northern China the vine dies a little every winter: bent, buried under the earth and dug out again in spring, a ritual that makes wine possible in the desert and gives every bottle a story.