China is planning to capitalise on its growing reputation as a global wine producer, the Ideal Wine Company has heard, by turning the Gobi Desert into a wine-making region.
France’s new competition
When you think of wine-making countries, who do you think of. Typically, you would think of France, Italy and Spain. France in particular has a reputation for making outstanding wines; if you want to see what we mean why don’t you try one of the Ideal Wine Company’s Bordeauxs today?
However, the traditional wine-making capital of the world now faces competition from the most populous nation on the planet; China. According to Italian Wine Central, China produced 11,178 thousand hectolitres of wine in 2014.
Gobi Desert wine region?
The thing about China is that we’ve only just begun to see what the People’s Republic is capable of when it comes to wine making. The country has vast natural resources, and with its gradually widening knowledge of the wine-making arts, it’s increasingly turning these resources to producing our favourite tipple.
However, CBS recently reported that China has decided to take an unexpected move; they’re turning the Gobi Desert in the province of Ningxia into China’s wine-making country. As we speak, investors are pumping millions of dollars into the project. Furthermore, producers are flooding the area with billions of gallons of water to irrigate the new vineyard fields that have been developed there each year.
Big dreams
CBS wrote that than roughly an unbelievable 80,000 acres of vineyards have already been planted in Ningxia. Producers believe that by the year 2020, this number will have grown to 160,000; giving it three times the acres that were planted in the now famous Californian wine-making region of Napa Valley.
These are big dreams, and wine producers have had to go the extra mile every year to even establish the 50 wineries that already exist in Ningxia. Shen Yang, the general manager of the Ningxia-based winery Chandon explained “we have to bury the vines every year in winter and de-bury the vines in spring,” to protect them from the notorious wine and cold that strike this region each year.
Gobi Desert label
Here at the Ideal Wine Company, we find this story fascinating. It’s already hard enough to grow vines in Ningxia, but now producers are taking on an even tougher challenge by trying to produce wine in one of the world’s harshest environments, the Gobi Desert. We hope they pull it off; we can’t wait to try a Gobi Desert label!
