Xiaopu & Domaine de la Gyalthang 小圃/建塘: We Taste Test 5 Wines From China's Leading Cult Natural Winemaker
One of the leading faces of China’s natural wine movement is a winery that owns neither vineyards nor winery buildings. What Xiaopu (小圃) has is partnerships with more than a dozen growers scattered across six regions of China, and an arrangement to borrow other people’s tanks and barrels once the grapes come in.
Vintage is spent being a nomad vintner: a night in one place picking, lunchtime on a plane, the afternoon somewhere else crushing the fruit before it can start fermenting, rinse and repeat.
Xiaopu founder Ian Dai (Source: Radii/South China Morning Post)
The distances are not small. Ningxia is desert in the northwest, Huailai sits a couple of hours from Beijing, and Deqin is in the mountains of Yunnan near the Tibetan border. Fewer than five members of winery covers all of it. Ian Dai (戴鸿靖), who founded Xiaopu in 2017 does not offer any of this as hardship. China’s extensive high-speed rail, road and airport networks is a “superpower”, he explained, as they allow Xiaopu’s team to easily travel between winemaking sites across the vast country. It also helps that the vines ripen at different times due to the highly variable climates of the various vineyards.
This is the adventurous story of how an ex-sommelier found his own way and built one of China’s most celebrated natural wine brand without its own vineyards or winery.
A sommelier-turned-vintner
Nothing in the first part of his life pointed to winemaking. Dai went to school in Australia before returning to Shanghai and deciding he wanted to get into food and beverage. In 2008 he took on a job in a Shanghai wine shop. Restaurant work came next, and then as a sommelier at Shanghai’s grand Fairmont Peace Hotel on the Bund.
By 2015 he moved into wine consultancy: running events, organising competitions, teaching. That is what put him in a classroom in Ningxia, in a region that was booming and wanted wine educators. Right outside his classroom was a vineyard. Dai realized that he wasn’t far away from winemaking. Yet he recounted in an interview, candidly, that Chinese wine did not impress him at the time. He felt that most of the wine was not made with care. He also felt that if he could try his hand at it, he could make something much better.
He did not act on it straight away. He went on to work in a wine social media start-up, consulted for a Chinese wine competition, and then took a job as wine and spirits buyer at Amazon’s China business.
By the time he left Amazon China, he had held nearly every job the wine trade has, and has tasted almost every wine he desired. He decided he would finally give the idea of winemaking more serious consideration.
Xiaopu was not immediately set up as a nomadic winery. The original aim was simply to find out what Ningxia’s grapes would give if the wine was made with care. But Dai quickly realized that just getting hold of fruit was more challenging than expected. He worked through his contacts looking for grapes, or for a patch of land to rent, and got nowhere for roughly two years, until he found growers willing to deal with him and a friend who came in with an angel investment.
Still, Dai had to learn how to make wine from scratch. His earlier wine education revolved around tasting it and selling it, which was a completely different apprenticeship from growing and vinifying wine. He signed up for the Master of Wine programme and quickly aborted that journey after realising that it offered little help for winemaking. So, the recipe for making his first vintage in 2017 came out of the books he read. He read that the wines he admired from Burgundy and the Rhône valley in France were fermented with wild yeast, which means the winemaker adds no cultured yeast at all and lets the yeasts already living on the grape skins and in the building start the fermentation by themselves. Dai looked at this and thought “OK, let’s just do it”. And this was hoe he became one of the first persons in China to move from the restaurant floor to winemaking.
He immediately encountered the unpredictability of wild fermentation. One vintage came out delicious, the next went sideways. So he spent several vintages travelling abroad to learn the craft. Here’s the neat thing: harvest in Australia and South Africa falls in the opposite tempo to China’s September and October, so Dai could work a full vintage abroad and could still be home for his. He worked at Bleasdale in Langhorne Creek, and at Pierro and L.A.S. Vino in Margaret River, in Australia, and at Momento in South Africa.
The little things stuck with Dai. At Bleasdale they were fermenting Shiraz in an open concrete tank that resembled a swimming pool to Dai – a method that he would adopt for wild fermentation of his wines. At Momento the team were delighted with a very basic old screw press. Dai learnt he could work with whatever tools he had, at any scale he was at.
A winery with no vines
He gradually gained his winemaking credentials and confidence. And while any new winemaker would naturally eye interesting high-potential vineyard land, Dai did not have large amounts of capital to buy land or even build his own winemaking facility at the time. So, he worked with what he had with a unique model.
Xiaopu farms almost none of its own fruit (with the exception of a small plot secured in 2024). Instead, they source from growers who hold the leases and do the pruning, the spraying and the watering. Once the fruit is picked, it goes into a Xiaopu-rented tank and cellar space at a working winery close to the vineyard.
Some importers describe Dai as something like a wine négociant – one who buys grapes from farmers and then makes wines under his own name. But it isn’t exactly his model. A traditional French wine négociant buys fruit from all over the map but brings it home to one cellar that it owns and controls. For much of its brief history Xiaopu, had no such cellar of its own. The wine is made in whatever tank and barrel space can be rented, in several different places. Dai’s own description was “nomad winery” (游牧酒庄): he rents room at wineries across the country and does his own thing there.
Indeed, he admitted that this model began as a pragmatic response to the lack of capital. Dai has said plainly that he could not afford a vineyard as an independent winemaker, and that building a winery on day one made no sense for a brand with no customers yet.
But even having more capital may not grant you as much access as you’d like due to the peculiar dynamics behind rural land ownership in China. In certain regions, few wineries actually outright own the land on which their vineyards are grown. Rural vineyard land in China is often owned by farming collectives. What changes hands are 20- to 40-year contractual leases to the land. In places where the really interesting terroir sit, the households who already hold those leases are frequently unwilling to pass them to an outsider. If Dai wanted access to some of these choice sites, he had to either work with their growers, or not work at all.
There is of course a small tradeoff of control. An owner decides when to prune, how much water the vines get, how heavy a crop to let them carry and, above all, which day to pick, which is an important decision that affects how ripe, how sweet and how sharp the finished wine will be. But Dai still had control over whose fruit to buy, and access to some of these coveted sites made it entirely worthwhile.
A rotating menu of labels and regions
Xiaopu doesn’t maintain a very static portfolio of bottlings, as much as it maintains something like a rotating wine menu that changes all the time. Blends often get reassembled from one year to the next. Wines appear for a single harvest and are never made again. Its bottles are sometimes split across dozens of separate lots in various regions.
Ningxia was the region that came first and is still the core for Xiaopu. The province sits in the arid northwest and the vineyards run in a strip along the eastern foot of the Helan Mountains. Xiaopu buys from Qingtongxia, at the southern end of that mountain strip, where the soil is sandy and drains fast along with the drying wind off the Gobi.
Hebei is another old connection. Huailai lies about two hours from Beijing in one of the older wine-growing counties in the country, cooler and more temperate than Ningxia.
Gansu holds two sites with almost nothing in common. Wuwei and Minqin sit in the Hexi Corridor on the edge of the Gobi, hot by day, cold by night and close to rainless, on sandy soil rich in minerals and short of organic matter. Tianshui, in the south of the province, is the opposite with green hills rather than desert, vineyards between roughly 1,250 and 1,400 metres on the eastern edge of the loess plateau and a growing season about a month longer than anywhere else in the northwest. This is where most of Xiaopu’s Pinot Noir comes from, as it is one of the more promising sites for Pinot Noir in the Chinese northwest.
Inner Mongolia contributes Tuoketuo, a county on the Yellow River outside Hohhot sitting almost exactly on 40 degrees north. The valley slopes on the north bank are one of the few genuinely cool-climate pockets used for wine grapes in China. The ground is gravelly sandy loam over old river clay, and below that lakebed gravel.
Sichuan also offers a range of climates. Xiaojin is a few hours from Chengdu in a high band along the Dadu River between about 1,900 and 2,600 metres, warm in winter and cool in summer. Lugu Lake sits on the Sichuan and Yunnan border, high in the Hengduan mountains. Waka, in Derong county on the Jinsha river, is a dry, hot gorge.
The Yunan region has vineyards that grow on the edges of slops up to thousands of metres high (Source: Radii/South China Morning Post)
Yunnan is the highest ground and the most recent to receive a label in its own under Domaine de la Gyalthang (more on this label later). Deqin, in the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture against the Tibetan border is roughly the latitude of Delhi. Xiaopu buys from from two villages there, Jiangpo and Ruiwa, at around 2,900 metres.
Since 2024 there has been the occasional fruit brought in from outside China altogether, bought in Marlborough in New Zealand.
Xiaopu’s labels: Xiaopu, Domaine de la Gyalthang and Old Apple
Xiaopu has two major labels. The Xiaopu core range covers the dry, hot northwest – Ningxia, Gansu, Inner Mongolia and Hebei. Domaine de la Gyalthang (建塘酒庄) covers high-altitude Yunnan fruit.
Inside the Xiaopu core range, four projects run year after year. The first is the flagship, Gathering (聚). It was one of the first wines Dai released, and it is a blend across several harvests, with most of the fruit from Ningxia.
The second is the Pinot Noir project, Perdue (迷惘), drawing on Tianshui in Gansu and Qingtongxia in Ningxia. It comes out as separately bottled lots. One lot is airy and lifted, one round and juicy, one built on structure, with a lighter fourth alongside them. His own comparisons for the set are Bourgogne at the regional level, Coteaux Champenois, the South Island of New Zealand, and, for the most structured of them, Nuits-Saint-Georges or Gevrey-Chambertin.
The third is a skin-contact wine project under the name Tangerine Dream (橘梦计划) under which the flagship is the Xiaopu Tangerine (小圃｜大橘大利), an orange wine from Ningxia built mainly on Chardonnay, with Petit Manseng, Viognier and Gewürztraminer. The same project also covers a set of pale wines, a rosé, a claret and a light aromatic red, sold abroad under the titles of songs from La La Land.
The fourth is the Huailai wines as a single region, single grape, with single-variety Chardonnay, Viognier, Roussanne, Syrah and Marselan wines.
There is also a run of one-off Ningxia bottlings that stand alone. There is a Pét-Nat (小圃｜贵人香), made from 100% Welschriesling alone. A Bordeaux-grape blend from 2019 called Rainbow (彩虹). The 1930 Cité Bourgogne, a blend of the two Burgundian grapes named after a laneway compound put up in Shanghai's former French Concession in 1930.
Domaine de la Gyalthang (which we'll be reviewing below) is the other major label that represents wines made from Yunnan’s Shangri-la city, although Dai deliberately avoids using the “Shangri-la” name himself, citing the fact that it was given an evocative name by the government in 2001 simply to attract tourists. Dai sought out the original Tibetan name for the area, Gyalthang (建塘).
Within the Gyalthang label, there’s the High Altitude Chardonnay that was given a fortnight in its skins and a year in old barrels. There’s the High Altitude Cabernet Sauvignon that was handled with much more restraint than most whites get. There is also a field blend rosé made from whatever grows interplanted on the slope.
Finally, there’s also a label does not cover grape wine at all. The OLD APPPPLE (老苹果) makes apple and pear ciders and an apricot wine from fruit grown at Qinhuangdao on the Hebei coast and in Ningxia. Several of the ciders are made using the pét-nat method.
Minimal-intervention wines that take time
The Chinese tagline on his official site goes “we’re making wines that require time.” He has described his quest to make balanced wine, always with wild fermentation, while working with local growers.
Dai has shared that he was influenced by the “natural wine movement”, although he refrains from adopting the label due to a slightly pedantic reason – Dai believes that only wines made without the help of modern amenities such as electricity, cultured yeast and additives could qualify as “natural wine”. What he has offered instead is “minimal-intervention”. Whatever the fruit came in with is what the wine gets built from.
Every fermentation is wild. Nothing goes in to correct the acidity (such as tartaric acid additives), and nothing goes in to firm up the tannins (such as powdered tannins). Sulphur is kept low and some of the wines carry none at all. The barrels are all old ones.
(Source: Drink China Wine Club)
Sulphur dioxide is another additive almost nobody in wine does without. A conventional dry red usually carries somewhere around 80 to 120 milligrams a litre. Most of Xiaopu’s wines are listed at under 10, and several have none added at any point.
It’s worth noting that for the past fifteen years or so, Chinese fine wine has usually meant a fairly specific thing. Cabernet Sauvignon, or a blend led by it, spending a long stretch in 50 per cent new French oak barrels that leave the wine tasting of vanilla, toast and sweet spice on top of the fruit. Dai called out this formulaic approach to making wine in China. While he isn’t opposed to this formula, he isn’t fond of the fact that this recipe has become too dominant in modern Chinese winemaking.
Therefore, Xiaopu only uses old barrels. A new barrel delivers a large amount of vanilla and toast to the wine. Xiaopu intentionally uses only old barrels so that the effect of barrel aging is confined to a small amount of oxidation through the porous wood that softens the tannins and rounds out the texture without accompanying oak flavour. These are fresher wines meant to stand against the very narrow style of rich, full-bodied, “boring” Bordeaux-inspired Chinese wine with heavy barrel flavour.
You could see a tiny scale as a limitation. But Dai has a different perspective. It meant that he could engage in more of these “natural-style” experiments without the guilt of incurring too much costs. Xiaopu ferments in very small batches, so all these natural wine-y operations become more feasible. Wineries operating larger tanks are pressured to salvage a batch with additives once the batch begins to go wrong because there is too much money sitting in it to write off. With smaller batch production, the upstart’s coffers are not bankrupted by one round of wild fermentation that has gone awry.
Many post-fermentation steps are particularly important to Dai, who has no direct control over how the fruit is grown anyway. Blending is a key part of Dai’s work. By the spring following a harvest he would have several dozen barrels of the same grape from the same place, each one slightly different from the next, and the wine gets assembled out of them.
It also helps that the fruit is often picked in stages of ripeness rather than in one pass, so that a single wine is built from lots brought in days or weeks apart at different degrees of sweetness. This apparently applies to every red wine at Xiaopu.
Broad principles of minimal-intervention aside, when you run a winery that makes over two dozen wines from seven or eight regions, there isn’t exactly a fixed recipe to follow.
The Huailai Chardonnay from Hebei gets seven days on its skins. The Gyalthang Chardonnay from Yunnan tends to get fourteen. An earlier batch of the Perdue Pinot Noir from Qingtongxia in Ningxia were vinified completely stemless, while in later batches Dai decided to add in more whole bunches.
Dai also appears to frequently do A/B testings. One batch of Gyalthang Chardonnay is bottled free run, and another pressed from the grapes. Dai expected the free run expression to be much more delicate while the pressed expression is more substantial and structured.
Sometimes, a barrel left partly empty will grow a film of yeast across the surface of the wine, a living lid that feeds on it and keeps the air off – what is called “flor” by Sherry makers. This is what makes fino sherry in Andalusia taste dry and salty, and what gives vin jaune from the Jura in eastern France its nutty, slightly savoury character. One expression of the Gyalthang Chardonnay is specifically aged under flor.
Seven years to break even
Dai’s business finally broke even in 2024, having weathered the most turbulent years for hospitality in recent memory during the pandemic. The ironic lesson he drew was the quality of patience. Chinese people of his generation did not have much of it, having grown up in a place where infrastructure around them developed at lightspeed.
And while Xiaopu is often hailed by people in the know as one of the leading voices in China’s natural wine movement, Dai does not oversell the domestic sales of his wine. Natural wine and pét-nat, by his assessment, may struggle to become mainstream in China.
Indeed, the first people to buy Xiaopu’s wines weren’t Chinese, but foreign expats drinking in Shanghai’s French bistros, looking to experience something more innovative. This is followed by Chinese customers who have been exposed to wine culture abroad, and finally beginners to the wine category. For these reasons, Xiaopu is focused on the export market.
He has since moved his base from Shanghai to Chengdu city in Sichuan, which situates him more conveniently with Ningxia and Inner Mongolia to the north, Gansu to the northwest, Xiaojin a few hours’ drive away in the same province, and Yunnan to the south.
His winemaking model is also changing. Dai is now able to acquire land, and manages a plot of his own in Yunnan. Why Yunnan? Dai’s view is that almost nowhere in China can bring in a harvest without added water, and that Ningxia was essentially desert before the vines went in. The Yunnan plot might be the exception. He is hoping it can be farmed on two short periods of irrigation a year, one after the winter pruning and one before the spring pruning.
Seven years in, China’s favourite nomadic winery is slowly beginning to put down its roots (or as the Chinese say 落地生根).
We had the opportunity to taste a range of 5 wines from Xiaopu brought in by the good people of Raw Wine SG!
Wine Review: Xiaopu Welschriesling Pét-Nat 贵人香起泡
A pét-nat sparking made from Welschriesling from Ningxia from the 2024 harvest. Most sparkling wine is made by secondary fermentation inside a sealed bottle. A pét-nat skips the second step altogether. The wine simply goes into the bottle while the first fermentation is still running, trapping the carbon dioxide within the wine.
Welschriesling is a central European white grape with high natural acidity and a late ripening date. It reached China in the early 1980s and has mostly been used since for semi-dry white wines.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Hazy pale straw, with a coarse bead that settles quickly.
Nose: Crisp and bright, ripe but not jammy. Apricots and a perfumed floral lift of orchard blossoms and light honey. It’s very clean with just a touch of bready or yeastiness you might otherwise expect from such a bottle.
Palate: A soft effervescence with sweet lychees, white peaches soapberry; mangosteens and langsat. It’s semi sweet but held in check by juicy acidity and crisp the whole way through.
Finish: Short and clean. Lemon peels and it dries off with a light stony minerality.
My Thoughts
This is incredibly clean and refreshing, and not at all something you’d immediately associate with a funky natural wine. It also carries a bit of substance and sweet fruitiness on the palate that is balanced by the light dryness and lemon peels. The sweet apricots and lychees stay in focus through to the stony mineral finish. A crowd pleaser that’s very easy to love!
Wine Review: Xiaopu Chilled Red Muscat Hamburg, Ningxia (玫瑰香)
A 2021 vintage Muscat Hamburg red.
The Muscat Hamburg (玫瑰香) is a table grape that was originally bred in Bedfordshire, England in about 1850. It reached China in the later part of the 1800s with missionaries and industrialists who founded the country’s first commercial wineries and stayed. It is now grown in quantity as a table grape.
The Muscat Bailey A, Japan’s most planted red grape, is itself a Muscat Hamburg cross made in 1927.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Light, translucent ruby.
Nose: A very summery red wine with tons of cherry, raspberry and pomegranate. Opens on the slightly tarter side before it gets rounder and a little darker. Further back there are some indistinct savoury spices.
Palate: Light red berries with a crisp texture: pomegranates, raspberries and cherries with very soft tannins. A light structural pull runs underneath with bright and faintly bitter orange zest, starfruits, and a slight mineral backbone.
Finish: Clean and dry. Finishes on dark cherries, more orange zest, a touch of earthiness, light cacao and espresso.
My Thoughts
Served cold, this is a refreshing, easy, and very summery drink for a red wine. It opens rather uncomplicated from the first sip and gradually develops into something slightly firmer, earthier and drier before finishing with some spice and peels. There’s a shade of tannins that offer some structure, but there’s absolutely no astringency. This is another highly accessible and easy entry point into red wines that may appeal to new drinkers in the East Asian market. It has a nice level of acidity to pair with grilled foods too!
Wine Review: Xiaopu Domaine de la Gyalthang High Altitude Chardonnay (Deqin, Yunnan)
A 2024 vintage Chardonnay from a high-altitude village in Deqin, Yunnan, wild fermented with fourteen days on its skins and twelve months in old barrels.
Deqin sits at roughly the latitude of Delhi, and a very long way south of every other vineyard Xiaopu buys from. At that distance from the equator the heat would ordinarily be far too much for European wine grapes, but the high altitude brings temperature down to a temperate climate. The ultraviolet light at that height is fierce enough that the vine answers it by growing thicker skins.
While everyone else refers to this place today as Shangri-la, Dai decided to name this label “Gyalthang”, to honour the Tibetan name for the place.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Deep yellow gold.
Nose: Aromatic and full of citrus depths. Opening with dried citrus, candied orange and lemon peels with some bitter pithy edge underneath the sweetness. Slight vellichor of an old bookstore, oxidative doughy, bread-like notes, while sweetness is balanced out by some high toned lemon balm with a light green herbaceous lift. Rounds out with vanilla cream and a touch of miso sauce right at the back.
Palate: Medium bodied with a plush texture, moderate sweetness. Candied lemon and tangerines, honey and Chinese malt sugar. Bright acidity under all of it that balances out the rich fruitiness. Baked apples arriving with a savoury turn, salted trail mix nuts. More pith, bread dough and a low miso umami beneath the fruit.
Finish: Rich to the end. Even more prominent citrus pith. More candied citrus and dough persisting, continued salinity and miso umami outlasting the fruit with a touch of fresh mint closing it out.
My Thoughts
This feels like an arthouse film. Nothing about this tastes like a chardonnay I’ve tasted anywhere else
For a Chardonnay that spent a fortnight on its skins, this is far more accessible and friendly than expected with plush tannins and balanced acidity. Still, the flavour notes paint the picture of a rather funky chardonnay that speaks very much of the wild fermentation. You get full-on candied citrus, tangerines and autolytic notes (breadiness and doughiness) with none of the toast or vanilla that you’d ordinarily see in a chardonnay. Bright but balanced acidity balancing out the richness thoughtfully with added complexity of the miso savouriness on the back.
Wine Review: Xiaopu 1930 Cité Bourgogne (Ningxia, Blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay)
This one-off cuveé is a blend of the two iconic Burgundian grapes grown in Ningxia, named after a Shanghai laneway compound called Cité Bourgogne (步高里) in the Shanghai French Concession. For the avoidance of doubt, “1930” here does not refer to the wine’s vintage, but simply the year that the Cité Bourgogne archway was built: 1930.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Garnet
Nose: Bright, perfurmed and savoury. Opens with dark cherry and tart haw fruit, a just as present miso, green pepper, fresh capsicum with a very cool-climate red character. Develops towards bright floral notes of iris and rose petal and then a touch of vanilla. Some cool minerality in the background.
Palate: Medium bodied with fully resolved tannins. Red tart berries; dark cherry and haw carrying the fruitiness with a stemmy edge running alongside green pepper and miso sauce. Bright but balanced acidity with lemon zest and black pepper on the back.
Finish: Plush and seamless from the palate. Fading notes of tart berries – haw, black cherry, cranberry and some emergent notes of apple sweetness. Lemon zest, black pepper green pepper and miso trailing off.
My Thoughts
A rather uncomplicated cool-climate red the whole way through with a touch of pyrazine: tart red fruits, gentle acidity, green pepper, soft tannins and light stemminess with no weight thrown around anywhere. The chardonnay seems to add a brightness and a lemon-and-lime dimension to the core of Pinot Noir.
In spite of the name, this is far from an imitation of a textbook Burgundy red with its notes of haw fruit, green pepper and miso savouriness that would not have classically come together on its own.
Wine Review: Xiaopu Domaine de la Gyalthang High Altitude Cabernet Sauvignon (Deqin, Yunnan)
A 2023 vintage Cabernet Sauvignon off the same slopes, fully destemmed, fourteen days on the skins, a slow wild fermentation and twelve months in old barrels – almost exactly the same processes that the Gyalthang Chardonnay was put though. We should note that cabernets are not typically handled with such restraint.
Tasting Notes
Colour: Deep ruby.
Nose: Dark cherry and mulberry with a slightly inky feel with a stemmy edge to it, a toasty, meaty note sitting over the top with soy sauce umami, a thread of steely minerality and hints of clay. A touch of violets and iris on the back.
Palate: Chiseled, fresh, medium bodied with a good deal of dark fruit concentration: Blackberry, blackcurrant, dark cherries and a smattering of raisins. Some vanilla, earthy stemminess amd miso butter. Acidity is bright and tannins are present but rather fine and polished. It turns towards a bit of savoury soy sauce, salinity and springwater.
Finish: Medium length, clean and lightly grippy. Blackberries and dark cherries holding their concentration before fading slowly. Warm indistinct spices and earthy herbs.
My Thoughts
Impactful, dark fruit-forward and cohesive. Given the wild fermentation used, I had expected something much looser or wilder, but what turned up instead was very clean, fresh and a very recognisable Cabernet Sauvignon: blackcurrant and blackberry, firm polished tannin, bright acidity, a mineral spine. Some interesting character shown as umami nuances and clay running alongside the fruit. On this showing, this seems like a wine that could be cellared for several years for tannins and acidity to soften further and for more tertiary notes and florals to come forth.
@CharsiuCharlie
