As Ningxia's best wines celebrate a decade of attention-getting quality this year, Mike Peters stops in for the year's last pickings.

The grapes that Mike Insley is plucking are not the fat table grapes that were favored in Ningxia just a generation ago. They are smallish, the size of blueberries, and their flesh is sweet as your grandma's pie.

Insley is delighted. "These are 24 to 25 brix," he says, referring to the percentage of sugar reached last weekend, the final days of the harvest for most wineries around Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui autonomous region.

But as I greedily pick another sugar bomb to taste, Insley's interest moves deeper. Spitting out the sweet pulp, he's now chomping down on the seeds with epicurean gusto.

"Nice, hard brown seeds," beams the viticulturist at Pernod Ricaud Helan Mountain, my first stop on a whirlwind tour of a few of the local vineyards. He squeezes the pips from another grape to show me. "Good crunch, too. You don't want to be extracting tannins from green seeds during fermentation."

The sun is shining, the sky is a brilliant blue, and all's right with the world of winemaking in Ningxia. Largely agricultural and Muslim dominated, this may be the world's hotspot for winemaking - and that's not just a local assessment.

"Ningxia's raw material is impressively consistent," writes Jancis Robinson, the author and Master of Wine whose recent visits are enshrined in her black Magic Marker signatures on French oak barrels in several cellars here. "The wines have an attractive frankness of fruit, rarely more than 13 percent alcohol nicely balanced by natural acidity."

China's winemakers have a reputation for being out for the quick buck: Make it fast and cheap, slap on a label with a pretty chateau and get the stuff in and out of the barrel ASAP. But for vineyards here, carved out of the sediments of the Yellow River on the eastern slope of Helan Mountain, that's old thinking. Boutique wineries have bubbled up all over this valley, winning international prizes and attracting partnerships with brands like Pernod Ricard and Chandon.

"Taste and seed maturity are both critical, especially for cabernet sauvignon," says Insley, bringing me back to the moment. "The skins are soft but chewy, so they will hold up in the fermentation tanks. There is enough sugar to yield wines that are 14.5 percent alcohol.

"All hallmarks of a really good wine," the New Zealander says.

So will 2015 be a great year?

"I'm a viticulturist, so I'm an optimist," he says, smiling. "What I can tell you is that very good grapes are going into the winery."

Inside, winemaker Craig Grafton is also sunny-side up. The Australian has been shepherding grapes here into something more exalted since 2011. This season's markers have been in good alignment: warm days and cool nights, quality fruits, low rainfall that extended the season to its sweet peak.

"The jury is still out on whether it will be better than 2013," says Grafton of the harvest that's reaching store shelves right about now. But you can't just replicate what you did before - grapes aren't the same every year."

As he leads the way into a corridor that reeks of CO2 - "that's the yeast doing its work, the first fermentation", the winemaker talks of whole-bunch processing, controlled extraction, refining rates, cold-settling and other fine points of his process.

While the grapes outside are pure sweet wonder, the first sip in a barrel-tasting session is a rude shock to the uninitiated. The wine-to-be is cloudy with yeast, its "nose" funky like old socks, but Grafton and Insley sip and spit with real pleasure.

"It's young. This was just grapes a month ago," Grafton says, with the pride of a father whose toddler is walking two months ahead of schedule. I'm impressed that their sophisticated palates tell them something lovely will come of this.

I'm much happier when we move on to the tasting room to try the special reserve chardonnay and the rich, red xiao feng, the "snow pinnacle" of the namesake mountain and the winery's premium label.

"It's been in new oak for two years, and it's got everything: dark chocolate, violets - a flavor bomb," he pronounces. "Delicious."

It's easy to get caught up in the spell of Ningxia as a wine paradise, but there is much work still to be done. From big producers like China's behemoth Changyu, founded in 1892, or fresh-faced boutiques such as Helan Qingxue and Kanaan, the past decade's quest for quality has shifted focus from the grapes themselves to the growing process. One example: Chinese traditionally have let vines grow straight up, eager to get the most fruits, but a modern approach favors horizontally trained plants that produce fewer grapes of more consistent quality.

The "Ningxia terroir" - the style and qualities imparted by a region's soils and climate - has yet to be defined. All the winemakers I visit over the next three days agree that will be key to the region's future.

"It's too early to tell," says Lenz Moser, an Austrian who has partnered with Changyu's 10-year-old Ningxia chateau to create specialty wines with enough character to excite buyers in Europe.

"We have three soil types here: sandy, loamy and fertile (like Naples) and rocky (like Rhone valley), all shaped by the Yellow River sediments and Helan Mountain.

"There was 300 years of winemaking in Bordeaux before it became a classification in 1855," Moser adds.

"The oldest Ningxia wines you can taste are Jiabeilan from Helan Qingxue, which started 10 years ago.

"All we know is that you get perfect grapes," he says. "High sugar, brown seeds and high tannins. Little disease. What else as a wine maker do you want?"

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 10/16/2015 page19)