Leading Chinese winery switching to biodynamic production
Top Chinese winery Silver Heights is in the process of switching its production to biodynamic methods.
Emma Gao, the vintner behind the winery told Vino-Joy.com said that the winery started its initiative of minimal intervention over ten years ago, but it was only in 2015 after visiting a few leading French biodynamic wineries that she ramped up the conversion process.
The winery’s 70 ha of vineyards are already organically farmed, though are not yet certified, and are now undergoing the complicated process of moving over to biodynamic viticulture.
“The land at the foothills of Helan Mountain is a sacred land, and we don’t want to see this generation of winegrowers exploit it to break this virgin land’s balance,” she said.
Since its inception in 2007, Silver heights has never added any correction juice or filtered its wines, and in 2012 it started to use indigenous yeasts for fermentation without the addition of sulphur. However, the experiment was a disaster as the wines could not stand up to Shanghai’s searing summer temperatures.
With less than 200ml rainfall a year, Ninxia’s dry weather is well suited to organic farming, with minimal risk of fungal disease. However, in 2017 when the region received unusually heavy rainfall, the threat of fungus developing on the vines was a very real one. “I insisted on not using chemical spray and in September all the leaves died,” said Gao, who added that the full conversion process could take “a lifetime”.