{"title":"Yunnan, China","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eYunnan is one of the most dramatic wine regions on earth — not as a marketing claim, but as a simple geographical fact. Vineyards here sit between 1,800 and 3,200 metres above sea level in the foothills of the Himalayas, where the Mekong, Yangtze, and Salween rivers carve deep gorges through towering mountains along China's remote southwestern border. Some plots sit above 2,900 metres — among the highest commercial vineyards anywhere in the world.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eThe history starts with missionaries, not winemakers. French Catholic priests arrived in the remote Deqin and Cizhong regions of what is now Yunnan in the mid-19th century, planting vines to produce wine for religious rites and establishing churches that are still active today — Catholicism took hold in these isolated mountain communities and remains evident in the number of practising Catholics in the region. The most significant of those missionaries was Jules Dubernard, who settled at around 2,000 metres in Shangri-La in 1865, and whose legacy has drawn modern winemakers back to the exact same spots over a century later. In 2012, Burgundian businessman Bertrand Cristau — with thirty years of China experience and inspired by Dubernard's own writings — climbed those same mountains to found Xiaoling Winery on the banks of the Upper Mekong, explicitly to continue the tradition those French priests started.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\"\u003eCommercial winemaking in Yunnan only really began in the 1980s, and the region remained deeply obscure until LVMH's arrival changed everything. Ao Yun, established by Moët Hennessy in the Adong village at 2,700 metres, became the project that put Yunnan on the international fine wine map — and in 2022 it became the first Chinese wine ever admitted to the Bordeaux Place trading system, the global merchant network that handles Bordeaux's most prestigious labels. That's a genuinely extraordinary milestone for a region most people outside China had never heard of a decade earlier\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"farmentation-when-italian-riesling-falls-in-love-with-pinot-noir","title":"FARMentation When Italian Riesling Falls in Love with Pinot Noir 2023","description":"\u003ch1\u003eFARMentation \"When Italian Riesling Falls in Love with Pinot Noir\" 2023\u003c\/h1\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA co-fermented white-and-red cuvee from a rural winemaking collective at 2,000+ metres in Yunnan's Hengduan Mountains — proof that China's most interesting wine scene might be its most obscure one.\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eGrape varietal \u0026amp; region\u003c\/strong\u003e: Italian Riesling (also known as Welschriesling, a variety with a long, overlooked history in China) co-fermented with Pinot Noir, grown by FARMentation in the Hengduan Mountains of Yunnan, at elevations between 2,000 and 3,000 metres. This is part of FARMentation's \"Renaissance\" line, built around reviving grape varieties that have quietly grown in China for decades without much attention — Italian Riesling and Black Muscat among them — alongside a separate line of Chardonnay and Syrah from higher-profile sites in Deqin. The altitude does a lot of the work here: intense UV, huge diurnal swings of 20 degrees C or more, slow ripening and thick skins, all pushing toward concentration rather than softness.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eTaste profile\u003c\/strong\u003e: A wine that splits the difference between orange and light red, with the textured grip of skin-contact white and the brightness of high-altitude Pinot Noir — savoury and a little wild at the edges, built for curiosity as much as for pairing.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWinemaking process\u003c\/strong\u003e: Italian Riesling skins were soaked in Pinot Noir's blanc de noir juice. Co-fermentation of white and red grapes together — an old-world technique (field blends, Portuguese vinho verde, some Austrian and German field wines) applied here to two grapes with no obvious business growing side by side, at extreme altitude, by winemakers explicitly working under the banner \"everything can be fermented.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eWinemaker\u003c\/strong\u003e: FARMentation is a collective project rather than a single named winemaker's estate — a group of winemakers, per their own description, engaged in a pastoral practice, rethinking the relationship between people, land and food. Based in rural Yunnan, they split their output between cider and perry, the Renaissance line of revived indigenous varieties, and a more conventional \"Terroir\" line of international varieties from named vineyard sites — this wine sits at the experimental heart of the project.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"FARMentation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43103070945378,"sku":null,"price":67.0,"currency_code":"SGD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0552\/1339\/1970\/files\/FARMentation-RieslingPinotNoirOrange.png?v=1783860746"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0552\/1339\/1970\/collections\/China-Yunnan.png?v=1783866289","url":"https:\/\/boundbywine.com\/collections\/yunnan-china.oembed","provider":"BoundbyWine","version":"1.0","type":"link"}