The 7th International Fruit, Vegetable & Food Exposition was inaugurated on September 23, 2005 in Yantai, Shandong province. As the staff of the wine information website, it was matter of course that I cared the wine best at this exposition.

At this exposition, Changyu held Changyu Wine Tasting and Mr Kreis, the international commentator, demonstrated extempore the art of tasting wine. Besides, Yantai Great Wall highlighted the eye-catching Great Wall Nanwang Valley Estate at its booth and many visitors enjoyed the free red and white Great Wall wines. In addition, Suntime also offered the free wines at its booth. Some visitors consulted tasting knowledge, others lost themselves in the tasting.

Participating in the exposition was not only to demonstrate the images, but offered people chances to taste wines, to know about the basic tasting and to experience the diversified flavor of wines. In short, it was important to do some basic propaganda  for popularizing the wine culture.

The winemakers at this exposition let me feel Chinese wine industry has made progress in quantities. According to the officials of Xinjiang government at this exposition, several new wineries were built in Xinjiang and produced wines there. Nevertheless, the vines could harvest grapes only after they were planted 3 or 5 years ago, so the prophase investment was zero revenue. Accordingly, most of the raw grapes of these new wineries came from the mature grape base of Suntime International winery Co., Ltd, which led to many winemakers rushed to buy wine grapes. 

Chinese land policies restrict the land usages of winemakers. Having exploring over years, the winemakers only could take two methods, namely: land lease and signing supply and demand contract with peasants. Today the difficult prevision of the land lease policy and the instabilities of the contract with peasants restrict the stable production of high quality wines as well. In my opinion, this instable land environment is one of the major factors that China lack high quality wines.

Leasing lands need abundant bankroll. Besides, the winemakers need to wager that the national land polices are unaltered after 30 years. Meanwhile, the local governments have to face the employment pressure of the peasants living on the lands. As a result, the winemakers which succeed in leasing the lands are only limited to the small winemakers who just need a few land. Most of the winemakers take the method of signing contracts with peasants, which is less investment and less risk. This year the conflicts between wineries and peasants sharpened because the peasants in several wine regions broke their contracts. Nevertheless, the government officials were at the end of their wits for that.

As for the land, the winemakers have explored over years for guaranteeing the raw grapes, while the peasants thirst for benefits as well, meanwhile the government control the land policies too. In short, a word “difficult” could not fully indicates the present wine production.

In my opinion, what we could do today is just to positively urge the wine customers to realize and even demand for the quality of wines, and to look forward to the wine association’s influence to national policies, and to attract the nation’s attention on wine lands and to issue the policies finally.  The road, which is from individual to collectivity, from inferior to superior, should be walked step by step.

At the end of the article, I like to quote the proverb of “Long as the way is I will keep on searching above and below.”  and present it to our favorite wines.