Frenchman Gregory Michel is resident winemaker for Hong Kong-based Lou Lan winery, producing award-winning wines in the Gobi Desert

A Hong Kong company has teamed up with French expertise in a venture to produce wines in one of the most remote places on earth - at a Gobi Desert oasis town along the ancient Silk Road.

The Hong Kong owners of Lou Lan winery pumped in more than HK$20 million (US$2.6 million) into what had previously been a state-owned winery near the oasis town of Turpan, on the fringes of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. Top-end winemaking equipment from Italy, France and Germany was brought in.
 
To ensure quality control, they hired a young Frenchman, Gregory Michel, as the resident winemaker. In addition to the existing Lou Lan vines, Mr Michel has brought in 500,000 cuttings from France, confident that within a few years the winery will be capable of delivering top-notch cabernet sauvignon and merlot  wines.

Already the skills of the Provence-born oenologist are bearing fruit. Two of the Lou Lan Winery's showcase wines picked up medals at a London competition, while his latest creation, a barrel-aged cabernet sauvignon, is winning encouraging reviews from the experts.

"At Lou Lan, I changed the winemaking process and introduced quality control all the way from the harvest to the bottling of the wine," he said. "It is step by step for every stage."

"You have to remember that China was closed for most of the past 50 years and did not have the knowledge about winemaking. If the country had not been closed, I am sure it would have an advanced winemaking culture now."

China's wine market growing

The mass-market wines in the Lou Lan range are sold mainly in the far western regions of China, particularly the provinces of Xinjiang, Gansu and Sichuan. The top-end wines retail from HK$35 (US$4.50) in a Xinjiang corner store to HK$100 (US$13) in the bigger cities, and are stocked in the better restaurants and hotels in Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou. The wines are also sold in Hong Kong where the head office of Lou Lan Holdings is located.

Most people are amazed that the wine hails from the Gobi Desert and are intrigued that Lou Lan Winery is owned by Hong Kong investors. The notion of a quality winery in the desert is not, however, quite as zany as it sounds - it just took an outsider's view, and savvy Hong Kong investors, to see the potential.
  
Turpan lies on the ancient Silk Road, where camel trains brought in then-unknown grapes from the West thousands of years ago. Deep wells and a constant flow of water from the close-by Tian Shan mountain range allow fruit to flourish in and around Turpan, in particular melons and grapes.
 
The winery has high hopes for its latest release, which will be distributed to the top hotels in China. The 1999 barrel-aged Turpan Basin cabernet sauvignon comes with an elegantly designed label, signifying intent to compete head-to-head with imported wines from France or Australia.
    
"Nobody is going to mistake the wine for a top class Bordeaux but I have been getting very good feedback," says Mr Michel. "I let French winemakers sample it and they were very surprised by the quality. It is like a good French wine.
 
"My ambition is to produce the best wine in Asia. Then I want the wine to join the best in the world. I think in four or five years we are capable of doing that."