High hopes for €300 Sacred Cloud red wine from China’s Yunnan highlands

In a function room at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, Jean-Guillaume Prats, president of Moët Hennessy Estates & Wines, presents a dramatic video of swirling white clouds over snow-capped mountains, long-haired yaks, old women in colourful dress, and terraced hills.

These images set the scene for the launch of Ao Yun, translated as “sacred cloud”, the company’s first foray into making wine from scratch in Deqin county, in northern Yunnan province bordering Tibet and Myanmar.

As Prats noted in his presentation at Vinexpo, the annual wine and spirits exhibition, the China market is a promising one, with consumption of red wine increasing compared with that of traditional tipple baijiu, and growing numbers of young middle-class drinkers, hence Moët’s lofty ambition – literally and figuratively – to make one of the greatest wines in the world there.

While Moët Hennessy has produced a sparkling wine in Ningxia, below the Gobi Desert in northern China, the company’s CEO, Christophe Navarre, felt it was time to try to make a red wine, and sent Australian wine scientist, consultant and winemaker Tony Jordan on a three-year journey around China to find the perfect spot.

That location turned out to be up an unpaved road a 4½-hour drive from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province in the country’s southwest, where there are four Tibetan villages, an hour away from each other, at altitudes above 2,200 metres. The climate is very dry, it doesn’t get cold enough in winter for snow, and there aren’t many insects.

The area gets only six to seven hours of sunlight per day, unlike the typical eight to 10 hours most other vineyards get, but it is the purity of the place, including water from the snow-capped mountains, that seems to have entranced Prats and the estate manager of the Moët Hennessy Shangri-La Winery, Maxence Dulou.