A glitzy Covent Garden award dinner gave Xi Jinping’s poverty alleviation programme in Ningxia a kick start. Here’s how
- Ningxia, on a similar latitude in the so-called golden zone for winemaking with Bordeaux wine region, is betting on viticulture as its ticket out of poverty
- Hong Kong is turning itself into Asia’s wine trading and distribution hub, after removing all duties and administrative controls in February 2008
For Zhang Jing, September 7, 2011 was the most memorable day of her life: it was when her 2009 Jia Bei Lan, a Bordeaux-style cabernet sauvignon, became the first Chinese wine to receive the top honour at the Decanter World Wine Awards.
“We felt like we had won an Olympic gold medal for China. We were so proud,” Zhang said in a telephone interview from her Helan Qingxue vineyard, which opened in 2005 at the foot of the Helan Mountains in the northwestern Ningxia Hui autonomous region.
“Competitors from South Africa, Australia, Argentina and California were already winners in their regions, but we were all competing for the top prize. Then our brand popped up. We won!”
The award was a seminal moment for the mainland’s wine industry, dispelling widely held views that Chinese wine was undrinkable.
But it also shone a spotlight on Ningxia, a landlocked sliver of land on the edge of the Gobi Desert, and on the important role winemaking has had and continues to have in boosting the economy of what is still one of the country’s poorest areas. Its average annual per capita income was 18,832 yuan (US$2,800) in 2016, in the bottom third of the country’s 31 provinces and regions.
Before the arrival of viticulture, Ningxia’s 6.8 million people, 36 per cent of whom are Muslims from the Hui ethnic group, relied largely on animal grazing, subsistence agriculture and the cultivation of wolfberries used in traditional Chinese medicine.
