In 1892 a merchant who had made his fortune in South-East Asia came home to found a winery. Zhang Bishi, known in the southern seas as Cheong Fatt Tze, chose the treaty port of Yantai, then Chefoo, on the north coast of the Shandong peninsula, named the house Changyu and had more than a hundred vine varieties shipped from Europe. One of them arrived under a name no European knew: Cabernet Gernischt. Changyu is regarded as China’s oldest winery and is still its biggest house, Yantai as the cradle of the country’s modern wine industry; in 1987 the OIV gave the city the title of International Vine and Wine City.
A grape with a false passport
Cabernet Gernischt was long taken for a European variety of its own, close to Cabernet Franc, until DNA analysis showed that it is mostly Carmenère, the Bordeaux grape that all but vanished from Bordeaux after phylloxera and survived in Chile; the name probably goes back to the German gemischt, a ‘mixed’ Cabernet. In Shandong it grows beside Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, Chardonnay and some Riesling, and it gives the province its own taste: medium-bodied reds with green pepper, herbs and a peppery edge, lighter than the Cabernets of Ningxia.
In the glass
The grapes the region is known for, by sweetness, acidity, tannin and body.
| Grape | Sweetness | Acidity | Tannin | Body |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cabernet Sauvignon | dry | medium to high | medium(+) to high | medium to full |
| Carmenère | dry | medium(−) to medium | medium(−) to medium | medium to medium(+) |
| Merlot | dry | medium(−) to medium | medium(−) to medium(+) | medium to full |
| Chardonnay | dry | medium to high | white, no tannin | medium(−) to full |
| Riesling | dry to luscious | high | white, no tannin | light to medium(+) |
Each grape’s typical range worldwide, not in this region alone, on the WSET tasting grid (Level 3, 2022): dry to luscious, low to high, light to full. The dot before each name shows the colour of a typical bottle.
Rain in August
The peninsula pushes into the Yellow Sea at about 37 degrees north, the latitude of Sicily, and the sea tempers it; but this is a monsoon coast. Of its roughly 650 millimetres of rain much falls in July and August, just as the grapes ripen, so mildew and rot rather than drought are the growers’ enemies, and the harvest can become a race against the clouds. What Shandong is spared is the winter: January hovers around freezing, and the vines stay standing in the ground, where in Ningxia or Xinjiang they must be buried. Penglai, west of Yantai on the north shore, has become the quality zone, with granite soils and hillsides; here Domaine de Long Dai, the Chinese estate of the Rothschilds of Lafite, settled on the site at the end of the 2000s, planted vines in 2011 on several hundred terraces in the Qiu Shan valley and released its first vintage, the 2017, in 2019. Changyu’s own Château Changyu-Castel stands just outside Yantai.
Sense of scale
19,000 ha Shandong has about 1.3× as many vines as all of Switzerland.
One square is all of Switzerland: about 14,350 hectares of vines.
Vineyards compared
Vineyard area in hectares, rounded, as the articles give it. Regions without a reliable figure are left out.
Big numbers, small share
China has about 755,000 hectares of vines, the third largest area in the world after Spain and France (OIV 2023), but the great majority carry table grapes, and the wine comes from a small fraction of it. By its own count Yantai alone makes about two fifths of the country’s wine (2024), while the estates of Penglai chase the fine-wine market that Ningxia opened. At the table the Gernischt reds belong with braised pork, leeks and sea cucumber, the classics of Shandong’s own cuisine, at about 16 degrees; the Chardonnay goes with the scallops and prawns of the Yellow Sea.