Lafite In China

It has been a decade in the making, but earlier this year the Château Lafite Rothschild owner opened its first winery in China, cementing the country’s position as a wine-producing force to be reckoned with. Jane Anson reports from the long-awaited launch

- Jane Anson

The Penglai Pagoda is one of China’s most famous tourist spots, known as the landing place of the legendary Eight Immortals in Chinese mythology and today classified as an AAAAA Scenic Area by the National Tourism Administration. Situated on one of the busiest coasts of the Shandong Peninsula – home to some of the best beaches in China – it is the location of a commemorative plaque that attests to the history of Penglai (under its former name of Dengzhou) as the ‘door for foreign merchants to trade with us and for Chinese merchants to trade abroad’.

Today, the special economic area of Shandong continues to attract foreign investment, with 2,500 Korean companies and 1,500 Japanese companies alone now based here, according to Yin Guowen, director of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Yantai Municipal People’s Government. In July 2019, its international appeal took on another dimension, as a symbol of the country’s evergrowing wine industry, when the doors were finally opened on the long-awaited Château Lafite Rothschild winery in Qiu Shan Valley.

Lafite has paid homage to the history of the region in the name chosen for its new winery. Long Dai (pronounced ‘lung dye’) refers to the sacred Mount Tai in Shandong, said in legend to have been thrown into the sea by the Eight Immortals in a fight against a sea dragon.

Shandong is where Zhang Bishi founded China’s first ‘modern-era’ vineyard and winery in 1892, but the past decade has seen the focus of Chinese wine shift to other regions – Ningxia, most obviously, as well as Hebei and Shanxi, and even Yunnan. Although China is now the 10th biggest wine producer globally and increasingly winning awards for its homegrown wines, it is still looking to establish a consistent international image when it comes to quality.