(Source: @tswf.sg)

A wine writer friend recently corrected me. I had been raving about discovering Chinese natural wines, all the surprisingly tasty things coming out of Yunnan and Ningxia and the like. She let me finish before saying: yes, but you only think they are so exciting because someone good has been picking them out for you. She had been to enough wine competitions around the world to know that what lands on a tasting table in Singapore is a thoughtfully curated cross-section, not the average.

I realised she is right. And a Sunday afternoon spent at The Smallest Wine Fair's ninth edition earlier this month made the case in obvious terms at the fair billed “The Smallest Wine Fair: From Peaks to Plains”. Eight independent Chinese producers had been gathered for the occasion, from Yunnan in the south-west, to Hebei in the north, to Gansu on the edge of the Gobi, to a small project working out of an apple orchard near Beijing. Each set up at their own table with their own story to explain in shorthand to whichever curious drinker turned up next. Walk-in tasting, bottles by the glass, DJs from late afternoon onwards, families and the occasional dog in the corner.

TSWF has been putting a spotlight Chinese producers lately - particularly to lean on the natural and low-intervention end of the country's wine scene. Chinese fine wine, on the international stage, is having a moment, but these are not quite the usual suspects in Chinese fine wines most people picture. The bottles getting attention now are not the typical internationally-styled Bordeaux blends that put China on the wine map in the first place. They are smaller, more locally interested, and considerably less concerned with passing as something already familiar to a Western palate. Many of them are made by a second wave of producers, often trained abroad and then returned home, who tend to share a few broad habits: native yeast fermentation, light extraction, indigenous or unfashionable grape varieties, an interest in altitude and the dedication to craft a very personal style. The eight projects at TSWF were drawn from that wave.

(Source: @tswf.sg)

The wine at the centre of my afternoon was Xiao Pu 小圃's Gyalthang Cabernet Sauvignon 2023, grown in a village in Yunnan at roughly 2,800 metres above sea level. That is altitude well above most of Mendoza. The wine was fermented with wild yeast, destemmed, macerated for two weeks, and aged for a year in old neutral oak. At that elevation, fruit develops thicker skins and holds onto more acidity than anything from lower-elevation Chinese vineyards, and you can taste it: dark cherry and dried herbs sitting over a cold, mineral spine, more reminiscent of a northern Rhône Syrah than a Napa or Bordeaux Cab. It will age beautifully.

Xiao Pu is the project of Ian Dai, an ex-sommelier and former Amazon wine buyer who pivoted to winemaking in 2017 and built what has come to be described as China's first nomadic winery. He does not own a single estate. Instead, he works across six different regions, sourcing fruit from small growers and fermenting it locally, with a manifesto that includes natural fermentation, no acidity or tannin adjustment, old barrel ageing, and a refusal to play the heavy, extracted, oak-dominated game that defined commercial Chinese wine for so long. One detail worth lingering on. While the obvious label name for this particular wine would be to reference the evocative Shangri-La of Yunnan, what we see was “Domaine de Gyalthang”. For context, the famous Shangri-La city didn’t go by this name until 2001. What might surprise many tourists is that the “Shangri-La” name was applied to the Yunnan city by the Chinese government in 2001, a rebrand drawn from the fictional valley in James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon and aimed largely at tourism. Dai prefers honouring historic Tibetan name of the place “Gyalthang (རྒྱལ་ཐང་རྡལ།)”, and uses it on the label.

Sho Fang 首芳 has staked much of everything on a single hitherto unknown grape. Joining us at TSWF was its chirpy founder, Hu Shofang, who grew up on a 1.77-hectare family vineyard in Qinhuangdao, Hebei, planted in 1990 to sell grapes to large industrial wineries. While her neighbours focused on planting higher-yielding crops, she and her partner returned from winemaking studies in Adelaide, took the estate over and pivoted the whole project to old-vine Muscat Hamburg, literally known in Chinese as “rose fragrance” (玫瑰香). Now, the Muscat Hamburg (also called Black Hamburg) was originally bred as a glasshouse table grape rather than a wine variety, which is one reason most mainstream wineries would not have noticed it. Hu Shofang’s bet was that the variety might have more complexity than anyone had given it credit for. The Orange Blend 2024 we tasted made that case in obvious terms: a literal flower garden on the nose, with white roses, apricot and citrus threading through subtle yeasty texture from natural fermentation. It tasted very much like its Chinese name. And what a pretty label at that!

There was also FARMentation 田园酿造 which is technically not a winery. Its founder, Luo Yuchen runs what is best described as a rural fermentation collective: one half of the project makes wine in Yunnan's Shangri-La corridor, the other half travels around the country making natural ciders and fruit wines from rural surplus produce. The wines have made their way into New York’s natural wine import circuit, which remains rare territory for any Chinese producer.

(Source: @tswf.sg)

The Jiangpo Chardonnay 2023 I tasted came from a village in Deqin, Yunnan, at around 2,800 metres. The nose alone justifies the bottle: crisp and mineral, with soft grapefruit and a pink-floral lift. The palate is light and smooth, rounded by what tastes like malolactic fermentation, with a brushstroke of bruised apple and a dry, citrus-driven finish. At that altitude, Chardonnay can pick up trace botrytis without picking up the corresponding weight; the cold, dry conditions concentrate the fruit without overwhelming it.

Gloriville 橙照葵然 sits at the foothills of the actual Great Wall of China in Zhangjiakou, Hebei, on 10 hectares planted in 1999 by Li Jincheng's family to feed grapes to large state wineries. Jincheng took the estate over after discovering natural wine in 2013 and has since moved the whole project through organic and then full biodynamic farming. His most pointed move has been on a grape, not a vineyard practice. He leans hard into Longyan 龙眼 (literally, Dragon Eye), an indigenous Chinese variety with an 800-year cultivation history that the industry had spent decades treating as cheap table-wine material. Pouring pale orange in front of me was “Villages, Heart of the plain”, labelled as a Longyan-Petit Manseng blend bottled without fining and with no added sulphites. The wine was softly oxidative, with dried apricot, longan notes (appropriately, given the name), very white floral lift and a slightly umami saline line. It’s fresh, floral with a slightly wild edge.

Roughly 1,500 kilometres further west with multiple wine awards on the international stage is Chateau Summerland 夏博岚 which sits in Wuwei, Gansu, in the Hexi Corridor: the narrow strip of land between the Qilian mountains and the Gobi Desert that for centuries acted as the main Silk Road artery between China and Central Asia. The vineyard is irrigated entirely by glacial meltwater, the climate swings hard between hot days and cold nights, and rainfall is almost an afterthought.

The Red Blend 2021 crafted from Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot announced its terroir: dark fruits, green bell pepper, a lift of Sichuan peppercorn, then a plush palate with spice and a velvety undercarriage. Tart black cherries on the finish.

Back across in Ningxia, Domaine Shepherd 牧童 is making a project of resisting exactly what Ningxia is best known for: heavy, extraction-driven Cabernet Sauvignon. Founders Shi Yue and Da Wei lean their wines toward tension and lift rather than ripeness and power, working out of the eastern foothills of the Helan range, the cluster of estates that has come to define Ningxia's modern wine identity.

What’s most intriguing and impressive is their Blanc de Noir Malbec 2024. Making a white wine from Malbec, a thick-skinned, deeply pigmented red variety, requires pressing the fruit before any colour can extract from the skins and then vinifying the pale juice as you would a white. Almost nobody in Ningxia does this. Shepherd is among a small handful of producers experimenting with the format. This blew me away. Aromatic and high-toned with melon rind, mineral, a tropical-fruit lift, gooseberry on the palate, sweet orchard fruit driving the body, and a dry finish that pulls through firm citrus peel. Off-dry and highly crushable. It’s subversive in concept, really easy to love in the glass.

What the array of wines and tables do not show you was the work behind it being there at all. Every one of those eight bottles arrived because, at some earlier point, a community of diligent wine professionals in Singapore did their homework and found that these were the producers worth flying in. Someone had to taste dozens of producers before settling on them. Someone had to navigate import licensing, shipping logistics, and the small-volume freight economics that make trade in independent Chinese wine difficult to start with. Someone had to form relationships with winemakers who speak primarily Mandarin and operate on entirely different communication platforms. Someone had to design the posters, and persuade these producers it was worth sending their wine to a back patio in Singapore’s Robertson Quay. The event organisers, the sommeliers, the importers: this is the connective tissue.

In Singapore, that work is concentrated in a small number of passionate wine people. The Smallest Wine Fair is co-founded and run by Aleksandar Draganić, a wine consultant with stints across Michelin-starred restaurants who has been building a parallel writing practice under the name The Grape Nomad. TSWF began in 2023 and has since grown into a small festival with several editions and masterclass programmes.

Other people doing this good work include Gerald Lu, founder and director at Praelum Wine Bistro and current President of the Sommelier Association of Singapore, who has been running a programme of Chinese wine evangelism under the banner “Praelum 爱中国” (literally, "Love China"). We have walkabout tastings, pairing dinners, with bottles from up until recently, less-discussed Chinese regions, paired with authentic cooking. In Gerald's interview with us, he puts his case directly: “It's a new generation of Chinese winemakers… they love their country, and they want to show that China can produce great wines. So look past the preconceived notions, because they're doing something good.”

Behind them sits the importers. Without them, no fair organiser or sommelier has anything interesting to pour. Racine Wines, in particular, has built up a portfolio of Chinese natural producers that turns up on the back labels of bottles across multiple TSWF editions, including FARMentation's Yunnan Chardonnays. Raw Wine SG has been part of the broader natural wine infrastructure in the scene, bringing in the likes of Xiao Pu and Sho Fang that are some of the most talked-about tables that afternoon. Chateau Summerland is brought in by Watering Hole SG, better known for bringing in beer and ciders from Japan and Korea.

(Source: @tswf.sg)

The full ecosystem in Singapore for these wines is still fairly small: a few importers, a handful of wine bars, one fair, the occasional masterclass. For a wine lover, though, I’d say that their curation has been highly consequential and instructive. The entire universe of Chinese wine is too vast and too unfamiliar to find your own way through. With the right people picking, you can drink across six regions in an afternoon and come out the other end feeling like every region you explored was memorable.

Aleksandar writes more about all of it, individual producers, the regions they come from, and the bigger arguments around altitude and low-intervention winemaking, at The Grape Nomad on Substack. He has personally visited many of these producers in person and walked the terraces. The Smallest Wine Fair lists upcoming editions on its socials – check @tswf.sg out!

@CharsiuCharlie