Changyu's modern and busy wine bottling line at Yantai. Ju Chuanjiang / China Daily

The world's wine producers have been looking for a bigger share of the Chinese market because of its immense potential among an increasingly aware population, in recent years.

Meanwhile, here at home, the Changyu Pioneer Wine Co Ltd, faced with an ever expanding array of overseas wines, has been working on convincing people that its wines can rival the world's best, from anywhere.

Quality counts

Changyu is one of China's top producers and parallels European wine producers in its grape planting, processing technology, and scale, said Sun Jian, the deputy general manager.

The company now has 16,666 hectares planted in grapes in the Xinjiang Uygur and Ningxia Hui autonomous regions, in Shandong, Shaanxi, and Liaoning provinces, and in areas around Beijing. These account for a quarter of China's grape-planting regions.

"The grapes from our six bases each have a different flavor, so they're used for different types of wine," Li Jiming, Changyu's chief engineer, said, by way of explaining why they cover such a large area.

Changyu has strict standards for planting with only 10 to 15 clusters of grapes kept on each vine to ensure each cluster of grape getting enough nutrition. And in the Chateau Changyu AFIP Global, only 266 vines are raised per mu, and the grapes from each vine are only be used to produce one bottle of premium wine.

In addition to ensuring grape quality, Changyu has spent a great deal on state-of-the-art equipment to produce a global winner.

It has an electronic tag for each bottle of its top wine so that customers can get more information on the wine, for example production, storage, and sales.

Changyu also has several chateaus, one of which, Chateau Changyu-Castel, was China's first to be built to international standard, in 2002, in Yantai, Shandong province, home of Changyu.

The company also opened an ice-wine chateau in Liaoning province, in the northeast, and Chateau Changyu AFIP Global, in Miyun county just outside Beijing, in 2006.

Another three chateaux are under construction in Shaanxi province and the Xinjiang and Ningxia autonomous regions, and scheduled for completion by the end of the year, all of them top grape-producing areas.

The company has also cooperated with four prominent chateaus to increase sales of its top wines overseas.

And its efforts have won some recognition. Yves Benard, the president of the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV), praised Changyu by saying that the Changyu Jiebaina is a strong brand with a long history. What's more important is that all of the judges approve of the wine's quality.