Waking the Sleeping Grape: the birth of the next wine superpower?
Straight from Macau, where I just spent five days judging at the Wynn Signature Chinese Wine Awards 2025, I caught this film, Waking the Sleeping Grape, on the way home.
This is a really interesting documentary of the rise of Chinese wine, taking in all the significant Chinese regions, and interviewing many of the top people involved in Chinese wine, from both China and outside. It’s directed by Shaghai-resident filmmaker Sebastian Basco and was released in 2023.
The impression you get is how fast things are changing. When the Chinese decide they want to do something, they can often achieve it fast. This is certainly true with their wine industry, where quality has changed rapidly over the last decade.
We begin in Yunnan in the Shangri-La region, which is small but very exciting and here a boutique wine culture is developing. Then we go to the powerhouse, Ningxia, which is the biggest region and which is dry and very continental. Next we are off to Shandong, on the coast, with more growing season rainfall and winters that aren’t so punishingly cold. Finally, we visit Xinjiang, another big region with an even more extreme continental climate that Ningxia.
That’s not to say there aren’t challenges facing the Chinese wine industry. And these aren’t skirted over in the documentary. In most of the regions, the freezing winters mean that vines need to he hilled over. This creates some viticultural challenges for how the vines are trained, resulting in a struggle to get even ripeness in the grapes, a problem confounded by the short, warm growing seasons in most of these regions.
The other problem is that the Chinese fell in love with Bordeaux, and tried copying the way things were done in Bordeaux both in the vineyard and the winery. Cabernet Sauvignon became king, and this isn’t perhaps the most ideally suited grape for many of the regions in China. And foreign consultants were all the rage. The film documents how this is changing, and the Chinese are developing their own wine identity as they grow in confidence. The final message is that China doesn’t need the external consultants and the big-shot critics with their high points scores (and in one high-profile case, a stated disdain for what the Chinese think) in order for its wines to develop and succeed.
The film resonates with my experiences judging this week. There are still many problematic sweet and sour reds, where sugar ripeness has been reached but there is uneven flavour ripeness, with some over-ripe berries and some very green berries in the same wine, often bolstered with a bit of sweetness and then at 15% alcohol. But there were also lots of really beautiful reds with balance and intensity, and also some nice whites and some impressive sweet wines. In 10 years’ time I reckon we will see even better wines, with fewer Cabernet Sauvignons, hardly any Merlots, some new red varieties better suited to some of the climates, and far more white wines. I think that the attention in China should firmly be on viticulture and achieving even, consistent ripeness, especially in areas where viticulture is hemmed in a bit by the need to hill over the vines. This is an exciting time for Chinese wine.
Currently the only way to see this film is on a Cathay Pacific flight. I hope this changes.
