GRAND CELLAR: Prolific quantities of wine age in oak barrels within the Grand Cellar of the Changyu Wine Company in Yantai City of east China's Shandong Province. Built in 1894, the cellar has gone through numorous renovations and is architecturally significant for its composition and close proximity to the sea (MATTHIAS MERSCH)

When I was invited to visit east China's Shandong Province for a wine festival held on September 23-26, I erroneously believed I would be drinking beer in the coastal city of Qingdao, home of world-famous Tsingtao beer. After all, the character jiu, meaning alcohol, is often mistakenly translated as "wine," although that term is specific to grapes, as it is derived from the Latin word vino, and shares the same linguistic root as "vine".

For those uninitiated to Chinese drinking culture, the potential confusion between white wine and baijiu (white alcohol) can become more than a merely linguistic headache, especially if one is expecting European-style alcohol fermented from white grapes and instead ends up drinking the traditional Chinese distilled sorghum spirit with a famously formidable alcohol content of 80 to 120 proof (or 40 to 60 percent).

Prior experience with Chinese wine had led me to believe that any kind of jiu festival in Shandong other than pijiu (beer) would be unthinkable. My ignorance would set me up for a series of pleasant surprises.

Where there is smoke

Being recklessly overconfident of my understanding of Chinese culture, my first mistake was to assume Shandong—also home of Confucius—was only renowned for its beer. Shandong people are prodigious drinkers, and their innate talent for imbibing alcoholic beverages dates back long before the introduction of Western lager beer.

Instead of visiting a beer festival in Qingdao, I would attend an actual honest-to-goodness wine festival in Yantai, about 211 km northeast. At the tip of the Shandong Peninsula, Yantai has long been a prominent city for cultural and economic exchanges. Together with Dalian in northeast China's Liaoning Province to the north, Yantai forms a gateway from the Yellow Sea to its west to the Bohai Sea to its east.

The name Yantai consists of two characters—yan, meaning "smoke," and tai, meaning "stage," alluding the purpose of a raised platform as a signal point to ward off pirate invasions. Clustered around the signal tower are several foreign consulates dating back to the colonial days of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). The consular offices formerly belonging to the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Denmark, France and Germany, have since been converted into museums, except for the German consulate, which was lost to fire.

Yantai is special in that although it endured colonial influence and wartime occupation, it never constituted a concession nor did it concede a leased territory to a foreign power, unlike other crucial ports such as Shanghai.

All of these factors taken together mean that Yantai is a multicultural city at an international crossroads with its own uniquely enduring and endearing characteristics. The cosmopolitan historical characteristics of the area present the proper social foundations for building a thriving Chinese wine industry. The climate is also quite suitable: Yantai enjoys an average temperature of 11.8 degrees centigrade, and there are only around 10 days a year when the temperature dips lower than -7.1 degrees. Yantai's latitude and climate are similar to the Bordeaux region of France. Consequently, in 2008, the wine merchants Berry Brothers & Rudd speculated that within 50 years, considering current meteorological trends in climate change, the quality of wine in China might rival that of Bordeaux, France. This seems like a very long time in human reckoning, but not even a drop in the bucket compared to the history of wine. Or China. Or wine in China.

A European legacy with local roots

The Changyu Wine Culture Museum is located at the site of the original Changyu Wine Company in the Zhifu District of Yantai City. There, I met Jean Pierre Surducan, a French-Canadian sommelier from Quebec who has been advising Changyu for four years, and has lived in Yantai for considerably longer. He told me about the history of the Changyu Wine Company and disinherited me from many of the preconceptions I had about Chinese wine-making—namely, my false belief that wine appreciation and cultivation are merely recent phenomena  that emerged only in the 1980s since the opening-up period of Chinese economic development. In fact, the history of wine-making in China is considerably older.

The Changyu Pioneer Wine Co. Ltd. is China's oldest and largest winery. Founded in 1892 by an overseas Chinese diplomat named Zhang Bishi, the company underwent many trials and tribulations and yet remains China's largest wine producer by an overwhelming margin. In 1894, construction began on Changyu's Grand Cellar, above which the museum is currently located. The cellar, having been rebuilt and renovated several times in its history, is an architectural triumph. It is nearly 2,000 square meters in size, seven meters in depth, and the floor is approximately one meter below sea level. Moreover, the cellar is only 100 meters away from the sea itself. These factors are advantageous in maintaining consistent temperature and humidity, crucial for consistently maintaining the delicate fermentation processes of wine-making. The cellar contains thousands of oak barrels and is home to the three largest wine barrels in Asia.

The vines themselves have stories to tell. In 1915, Zhang visited the United States to attend the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. While there, he visited 22 states, and traveled over 10,000 miles before finally returning to China with around 2,000 plants. However, these grapes were of insufficient sweetness and half of them rotted on the vines before harvest. Another batch of 640,000 plants imported from Europe met a similar fate, and very few survived. A Belgian enologist and viticulturalist named Mr. Balboa observed that foreign grape plants had no natural resistance to a type of root-eating insect indigenous to Shandong. The problem was solved by grafting the roots of a variety of white grape from northeast China to the European red grape plants. Although the Chinese grapes bore bitter fruit, the resultant hybrid—called Cabernet Gernischt—is rich in sugar and resistant to cold, root-eating pests and disease. Since blight wiped out the original French counterparts from which Gernischt grapes are derived, this type of grape is now peculiar to China.

Wrath of the grapes

The most striking departure from European tradition arises from the nuances of Chinese drinking culture, where by failing to empty one's glass after a toast can result in a loss of face. Here, Chinese enthusiasm triumphs over European protocol. However, the sight of a person consuming an entire glass of wine in one or two gulps elicits some discomfort even from an unsophisticated Yankee who was chided by relatives year after year for "sculling" wine during Thanksgiving dinner. Surely, I thought the graceful and dignified sommelier would agree that wine should be sipped at a leisurely pace rather than dumped down the hatch with the same fervid enthusiasm as one might show when toasting beer and baijiu with the typically expectant ganbei (bottoms up). That is, until Mr. Surducan said in his gentle Quebecois accent, "When in China, do as the Chinese do," and proceeded to do just that.

Not far from Yantai is Penglai, a city named for the mythical mountain from which the Eight Immortals of Taoism embarked on their journey across the sea. Among the many historical exhibits on the Penglai Pavillion is a display of the Eight Immortals in a state of merry intoxication, sprawled on stools and the floor. If the ancient wine of Shandong could do this to Eight Immortals, the effects of the modern stuff on one mere mortal could only be more severe. And yet, I will never forget anything I had learned in Yantai, except for certain dimly recollected things better left unremembered.

The author is an American living in Beijing