By Access Asia
According to China’s Yantai COFCO Winery, Chinese vintners are still not able to make pure vintage wines but will be able to do so by 2005.
The winery was responding to criticisms that Chinese wineries use imported raw materials for wine that were effectively ‘foreign waste’. However, Yantai claims that this is surplus material and needed in China due to current supply shortages.
However, there are still concerns that too many local producers in China claim on their labels that their product is ‘vineyard wine’, i.e. from grapevines of more than seven years of age. The vast majority of producers in China have vineyards under ten years old and most much more recent.
