The depth China will go to in order to produce wine...

I recently learned that vineyards in some of the most popular wine regions in China bury their vines. This shocked me! Imagine driving through Napa and just seeing dirt...

Vineyards in Inner Mongolia with buried grapevines.

If Domaines Barons de Rothschild is buying vineyards in the Shandong province and burying vines, I imagine this must be a respected method of growing grapes, so I decided to do a bit more research.

Inner Mongolia has extremely long, extremely cold winters.  This causes a problem for grapevines, which don’t like long periods of cold weather.  The temperature in this region of China has reached record lows of -40º F and can remain below freezing for as much as five months of the year. Grapevines on the other hand, start to lose productivity around 9º F, according to Washington State University’s Viticulture and Enology department.  This presented a problem for farmers in Inner Mongolia who wanted to grow grapes.  It turns out they’re not the only ones with this problem. Researchers at Cornell University’s Enological school addressed this issue when New York’s wine regions lost a significant portion of their crop due to cold temperatures.  They concluded that burying healthy grapevines can protect them from harsh winter freezes, albeit with some consequences.  The study expresses that “buried buds are often weaker and less productive than buds left unburied when winters are mild” and “that in spring the buried buds will emerge later than ‘normal’ buds and may produce less fruit.” I also imagine that the labor costs associated with burying vines could be astronomical in places like the US, but China is able to do this due to inexpensive labor.