Father Yao Fei fills our glasses with his home-made red wine, which has matured for 12 months in a family size Sprite bottle. I wish the priest good health and take a cautious sip.
'The grapes are from the church's own vineyard,' Father Yao says. 'I made the wine the way the French fathers taught.' The original Cizhong vineyard was planted by French missionaries almost a century ago. Every family in this Tibetan village in northwest Yunnan tends its own vines, bottles its own vintage - and makes the same claim about authentic French methods. Having tried several of them, I feel something must have been lost in translation.
Father Yao's wine slips down, leaving a familiar sweet-and-sour wake, but after two bone-rattling days in a four-wheel drive, I am nonetheless grateful for the refreshment. I drain my glass and offer it up for a refill.
In October 1923, plant hunter and National Geographic explorer Joseph Rock was also 'hospitably given a room' at the Cizhong mission. Although he didn't mention trying the wine, he surely must have enjoyed a drink after the rigours of the trail. He had departed his home outside Lijiang, Yunnan, in the first week of October, travelling with a caravan of 15 men and probably twice that many horses and mules. It took us 48 hours to make the drive from Lijiang, but Rock's caravan trudged for two weeks to reach Cizhong, which sits on the far bank of the Lancang (Mekong) River. There were no footbridges in 1923: the only way to cross the river was to slide across on an early form of zip line, a rope strung between the two banks. Rock compared the experience of being strapped into the harness to 'the administering of the anaesthetic before an operation'. Even the horses had to be tied on and slid across. Rock wrote: 'When they arrived on the other side they lay down on the rocks, too frightened to stand.'
As far as Cizhong, my own small team has been able to track his journey by car, but to follow Rock's route any farther, there is no alternative but to travel old style. No roads cross the Biluo mountain range, which divides the Lancang and Nu (Salween) valleys, within 200 kilometres of Cizhong.
It has been raining almost constantly since we left Lijiang and, with the date already October 17, our Cizhong mule drivers are anxious about the possibility of snow on the heights. As we drink our wine on Father Yao's veranda, the weather brightens, and stars are glittering over the church tower by bedtime.
Unfortunately, we wake to another gloomy morning, and drizzle has set in by the time our caravan is ready to depart. The chief muleteer, a villager in his mid-40s named Wuqi, would clearly prefer that we change our minds. He has called us regularly over the last three days to fret about the rain.