What I Brought Home from Ningxia

In June 2025 I flew to Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwestern China, to judge at the 32nd Concours Mondial de Bruxelles. It was my eighth time at the main event. I know the format well: three days of blind tasting, round tables, fifty wines a session, the particular focused silence that settles over a room of serious people doing serious work. What I did not know was what the Ningxia visit would leave me with long after the judging was over.

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Yinchuan, June 2025

The Concours Mondial has been held outside Europe before. But returning to China for the 32nd edition carried a specific weight. The competition brought 375 judges from 56 nations to blind-taste 7,165 wines over three days. Chinese producers submitted in numbers that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. And the wines they submitted, at least many of them, were good enough that you stopped noticing they were Chinese wines. You just noticed whether they were good.

That is a harder thing to achieve than it sounds.

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A bottle with a story

After the judging finished, a fellow judge pressed two bottles into my hands. His name is Deng Zhongxiang, and the bottles were from his personal label, Beyond Time: a Syrah, Monopole, from the 2013 vintage.

I already knew something about Deng. He trained and worked in France, spent years absorbing the rhythms and values of Burgundy, and then came back to China. Not to consult from a distance, not to lend his name to a label, but to make wine. He consults on ten projects across Ningxia now, working with producers like Charme, Lansai, and Mountain Wave. His Beyond Time Syrah appeared in James Suckling’s Top 100 Wines of China in 2023. But none of that is quite the point.

The point is that the 2013 was, unmistakably, an old-world wine. Not an approximation of one. Not a wine that gestured toward Rhône and fell short. The structure, the restraint, the relationship between fruit and earth: these were not borrowed aesthetics. They were earned. Deng had brought something back from France, a way of thinking about what wine is supposed to do, and he had applied it to a vineyard in the Helan Mountain foothills of Ningxia. The result was singular. A wine with no obvious precedent on either continent.

That is a specific kind of achievement. It requires not just technical skill but the courage to resist the shortcuts, to not over-extract, to not chase international scores, to wait twelve years before handing the bottles to someone at a competition in your own region. It requires faith in the wine.

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Chandon, taken seriously

On a separate visit, I went to Chandon Ningxia. I was curious whether a major international house could plant something genuine in this landscape, or whether it would feel like a boutique outpost of somewhere else.

It did not feel like an outpost. The infrastructure is remarkable, the architecture considered, the vineyards well-tended and clearly the result of years of careful site selection. The wines were good. More than that, the whole operation felt like a long-term commitment. Not an experiment. Not a market-entry play. Moët Hennessy has been building this for years, and it shows. When a company of that scale invests in place rather than brand, the wines tend to have something to say.

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What this moment is

In 2025, Chinese wines won Best in Show at the Decanter World Wine Awards for the first time since the category was introduced in 2016. One of those wines came from Ningxia, from the Helan Mountain East sub-region where Deng Zhongxiang also works. It is the kind of result that gets noticed in wine circles, discussed, debated. Some people will find reasons to qualify it. That is how these things go.

I judge blind. I tasted what I tasted. The 2013 Beyond Time Syrah is on my desk as I write this. It has held its color. The nose is still speaking.

There is a kind of wine culture emerging in Ningxia that is not trying to replicate anything else. It is building its own vocabulary, imperfectly and seriously, through people like Deng who have gone elsewhere, learned deeply, and come home. Whether the global wine industry has the patience to follow that story over decades, rather than celebrating a headline and moving on, is a different question.

I hope it does.

It was also good, as it always is, to share a judging table with people whose palates and judgement I trust. A few of my fellow judges at the 32nd edition: Kateryna Yushchenko, Daniel Ercsey, and Karina Aggarwal. Worth following if you are not already.