Last night I had the privilege of speaking in front of a group of wine lovers at the Natural History Museum. I was joined by Peter Couins, a grape rootstock breeder and geneticist who works in the Finger Lakes, researching and teaching at Cornell. Our lecture was about the ancient wines of the Silk Road, how the grapes came to be in this particular part of China and how these have woven their way into the modern world.
The tone for my evening was set by the shipment of live snakes and lizards that was arriving at the same time I was. Nothing says ‘natural history’ quite like live reptiles! Yikes. Luckily, we were headed into the education wing with our wine.
You might be wondering what the Silk Road has to do with wine – well, quite a bit in fact. It was along this route that grape vines made their way from the middle east to the far east. The area of Turfan, a desert oasis in northwestern China, near the Mongolian border, had three distinct periods of wine grape cultivation and wine production: the Han Dynasty, the Tang Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty. Modern day Turfan’s wine industry marks this as the fourth. Vines were brought to Turfan from Turkey, Pakistan, and India, most likely, and were taken further east into China, and eventually made their way to Japan. These grapes are very different looking from their cousins from France and Spain and Italy. Here, the grapes tend to be small, and in smaller clusters than the eastern varieties, which have large berries and large clusters.
Most of the cultivated grapes that found their way to Turfan were used for raisin production, however, many are grown solely for the purpose of making wine. Today, China is the world’s 6th. largest producer of wine! It’s not the first thing you think of when you think of China, but it may be in the future. Wine is becoming popular among the growing middle classes, and is a status symbol for the wealthy. Since red is the color of happiness and celebration in China, and red wines have been proven to have positive health properties, most of the wine consumed in China is red. Modern day red wines tend to be made from Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Gernischt, and Merlot, with other western grape varieties and eastern making their way into the mix. But back to those ancient varieties that made their way along the silk road.
Pictures of a few varieties in Pakistan and India, Afghanistan and Turkey are below. These are similar to the grapes that can be found there today, along with the european varieties used for modern wines. In Turfan, the desert oasis at the foot of the Flaming Mountains, wild grapes were not naturally found. Wild grapes tend to be found where there are deciduous trees that the vines can climb. There are no treees in Turfan, or at least not large amounts of deciduous trees, so any grapes there were brought there from somewhere else. A grape called Mare’s Teat (Maru) and Snake and Dragon Pearl (Cabernet Gernischt) were some of the earliest grapes recorded in the area, during the Han Dynasty. Rkatsiteli, Muscat Hamburg, and Welschriesling found their way to China through Russia, and modern vines were brought there from Europe. There is now a grapevine nursery in China, a joint venture with a French nursery, and the beginnings of a new history of grape growing.
As mentioned, China is the world’s 6th largest producer of wine, and the population is huge, so you’d think that they drink all of their own wine, right? Well, they don’t. Wine consumption per capita in China is about .47 liters per year, while worldwide average wine consumption per capita is about 10 times that, at 4.7 liters per year. So, the potential for the world’s largest wine industry is there, but most of the population drink locally produced beers and spirits, which are cheaper and more familiar. If modern trends persist, we may see some exciting developments for wine in China.
Wines tasted at the event:
Strauss Welschriesling 2008, Sudburgenland, Austria
Dr. Konstantin Frank Rkatsiteli 2007, Keuka Lake, New York
Lingenfelder Morio Muscat ‘Bee Series’, Pfalz, Germany
Schneider Cabernet Franc, North Fork of Long Island, New York
Tags: ancient wines, grape vines, maslow6, Museum of natural history, silk road, wine cultivation, wine lovers
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