Silver Heights: Ten Barrels and a Family Bet
Ten Barrels
Section titled “Ten Barrels”In 2007, Emma Gao came back to Ningxia from Bordeaux with three things: a French national winemaking diploma, a French husband, and ten barrels of ambition.
Ten barrels. Less than one hectare of family vineyard. A winery facility cruder than a garage. The famous garagistes of Bordeaux’s right bank, Le Pin and Valandraud, at least had a proper garage. Emma had less.
Behind those ten barrels was a ten-year bet placed by her father.
Gao Lin was originally a clothing manufacturer in Yinchuan. In the late 1990s, he planted his first Cabernet Sauvignon vines, imported from France, on the eastern foothills of Helan Mountain. Then he did something almost no Chinese winemaker had done before: he waited. He waited for the region to mature. He waited for his daughter to finish school. A clothing-factory owner spent ten years preparing to make wine. People in Yinchuan thought he was crazy. He called it site selection. The land was part of it; so was waiting for the region and his daughter to be ready.
He also sent his twenty-one-year-old daughter to study oenology at the University of Bordeaux.
Emma entered in 1999. Almost no Chinese women in her class. Her French was fluent enough to interpret for Chinese classmates. Before Bordeaux, she had spent five years studying Russian in Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
During her studies, she interned at Château Calon-Ségur, the Saint-Estèphe third growth famous for its heart-shaped label. There she met Thierry Courtade. Thierry’s family had worked at Calon-Ségur for three generations; he had grown up in the cellars. They married in 2003. In 2005, Thierry came to China with his wife and daughter. Emma worked briefly at a Xinjiang winery, then in Shanghai as a wine sales rep. By 2007, father and daughter agreed the moment had arrived.
Ten barrels. Silver Heights started there.
Gao Lin liked to tell friends: “I sent her to Bordeaux to study winemaking. I didn’t expect her to bring back a diploma and a granddaughter.”
A Bottle of DRC and a Bottle of Helan Mountain Chardonnay
Section titled “A Bottle of DRC and a Bottle of Helan Mountain Chardonnay”Silver Heights has been served at Chinese state banquets twice. The first time was significant. The second is more revealing.
In 2016, Premier Li Keqiang hosted Chancellor Merkel with The Summit 2013 and Family Reserve Chardonnay 2014. The first time Ningxia wine had been used at a diplomatic state event. The signal was clear: China now had wines worth pouring.
The 2019 story has more layers. November 5th, Shanghai, the Second China International Import Expo. Macron presented Xi with a bottle of Romanée-Conti 1978. The king of Burgundy. A legendary vintage. Roughly twenty thousand euros at retail. Xi reciprocated with Silver Heights Family Reserve Chardonnay 2017.
A DRC, and a Helan Mountain Chardonnay.
By market price, these two bottles differed by several hundred times. But diplomacy is not an auction house. The choice of DRC 1978 was deliberate: 1978 was the first year of China’s Reform and Opening. Macron’s protocol team had clearly done their homework. The Chinese reciprocation chose a family-owned boutique estate, not a state-owned giant.
Family Reserve Chardonnay, made in a Burgundy style, scored 92 from James Suckling and took a gold at DWWA 2024. More than one critic has called it “one of the best white wines made in China.” After the banquet, overseas demand jumped.
A Winemaker Who Practices Tai Chi in the Vineyard
Section titled “A Winemaker Who Practices Tai Chi in the Vineyard”Bordeaux gave Emma her foundation. Burgundy gave her direction.
In 2009, she visited Domaine Leroy. Lalou Bize-Leroy’s uncompromising commitment to biodynamics shook her. From that point on, Emma began rethinking how she made wine. She has said that before Burgundy, she thought winemaking was a technical question; after, she understood it as a land question.
She walked a path that only makes sense in China: the biodynamic lunar calendar and the traditional Chinese agricultural calendar both organize farm work by the cycles of the moon, with natural overlap. Emma practices Tai Chi in the vineyard. Not for show. She has said quite seriously: “Biodynamics is not unfamiliar to Chinese people. The twenty-four solar terms, Tai Chi philosophy, it is fundamentally the same thing.”
Ningxia annual rainfall is under 200 mm. Fungal disease is rare. Organic certification is comparatively easy here. So some have questioned: in such an arid region, is biodynamics overkill?
The question misses a point. Biodynamics is not only avoiding chemicals. It is a soil-management philosophy. Ningxia’s grey-calcium soils are low in organic matter and microbial activity, exactly the condition where biodynamic practice can do real work. Silver Heights began making its own compost in 2016 and formally adopted biodynamic farming in 2018. In September 2023, the estate received Demeter certification: the first in China.
From the Leroy visit to the Demeter certificate, fourteen years.
Rice Wine in Sparkling
Section titled “Rice Wine in Sparkling”Silver Heights makes a portfolio richer than most Ningxia estates, and bolder. The flagship The Summit. The uncompromising Emma’s Reserve (100% Cabernet Sauvignon, 100% new French oak, 2,000 bottles a year, made only in vintages Emma approves). The state-banquet Family Reserve Chardonnay. These are the formal wear.
What truly impressed me about Emma is the casual wear.
Bloom Sparkling. Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Ningxia rice wine, made in the méthode ancestrale. Pink-orange. Honeydew melon and banana flower. A rice-husk grain depth that runs underneath. Putting rice wine into sparkling wine is something only China would think to do, and only a confident winemaker would actually do.
Orange wine. Made in Chinese traditional clay amphorae. When the Georgian qvevri rode the natural-wine wave around the world, Emma chose her own country’s vessel tradition instead.
Barbera. An Italian Piedmont grape, growing on the eastern foothills of Helan Mountain. Also Pinot Noir, Marselan, Grenache, Tempranillo, and Sangiovese. Silver Heights’ vineyard now grows more than fifteen varieties. Cabernet Sauvignon accounts for only forty percent.
Emma earned her diploma in Bordeaux, but she has no intention of making China’s Bordeaux. From ten barrels to 50,000 bottles a year, eighteen years. As production grew, the wines became less Bordeaux and more Helan Mountain’s own.
A former Silver Heights employee, Liu Jianjun, later founded Lingering Clouds (留云), making Cha-donnay — a pet-nat of tea infused with Chardonnay — that landed on James Suckling’s Top 100. Jasmine, oolong, and Longjing tea blended with Chardonnay into natural sparkling wine. The people who came out of Silver Heights are reshaping Ningxia in their own ways.
The Classified Estate That Is Not Classified
Section titled “The Classified Estate That Is Not Classified”Silver Heights is not on Ningxia’s classified-estate list.
Ningxia’s classification, modeled on Bordeaux, evaluates estates every two years. One of the criteria is tourist-reception capacity. Silver Heights is a family boutique estate without large reception facilities; visits are by appointment only. It does not meet that criterion.
Gao Lin has said it plainly: “Setting up classifications right now is too early, too rushed. Compared with Bordeaux, Ningxia is still an infant.”
The absurdity is this: the classification’s purpose is to mark the region’s best estates, and it has ended up excluding the estate with the highest international reputation. Silver Heights exports to twenty-one countries. Oeno Group serves as the exclusive London representative. Dan Murphy’s stocks it in Australia. In 2024, the estate’s export revenue was 2.3 million RMB, representing 17% of Ningxia’s total wine exports. Jancis Robinson wrote about Silver Heights in the Financial Times in 2010. James Suckling has named it Best Chinese Wine three years in a row.
When your wines have already earned shelf space on fine-wine retailers worldwide, does the local classification label still matter?
Emma probably does not particularly care. She is busy with other things. The new estate facility in the Jinshan sub-region is complete, an hour northwest of Yinchuan, closer to Helan Mountain. The vineyards have grown from under one hectare to seventy. New plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Marselan. Production target raised to 200,000 bottles. The new site has finally allowed Emma to host visitors properly. Before, those who wanted to visit had to book and hope.
Whether the classification list includes Silver Heights starts to look more like a problem of the list than of the estate.
The Bordeaux Man at Minus Twenty-Five
Section titled “The Bordeaux Man at Minus Twenty-Five”Thierry Courtade, co-winemaker. Three generations of his family worked at Château Calon-Ségur. He grew up in the cellars. In 2005 he came to China; in 2012 he formally left France to settle in Ningxia. Three generations of left-bank Cabernet expertise, now applied to the eastern foothills of Helan Mountain.
Ningxia winters reach −25°C. Every autumn, vines must be bent down and buried under thirty centimeters of soil to survive. No Michelin restaurants. None of the left-bank lifestyle. The Ningxia provincial government has given him its Friendship Medal. But what matters more than the medal: he stayed. He put down roots. More than a decade.
Emma has named two philosophers she returns to: Zhuangzi and Rousseau. Zhuangzi’s follow nature. Rousseau’s return to nature. A Chinese winemaker reading French philosophers, on Chinese land, using French technique to make Chinese wine, then using Chinese philosophy to re-understand the whole undertaking.
No other Ningxia estate combines a three-generation Bordeaux pedigree, Chinese family ownership, and Demeter certification.
Visiting Notes
Section titled “Visiting Notes”| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Address | Helan County, Yinchuan, Helan Mountain East Foothills (new site near Jinshan) |
| Visits | By appointment only |
| Website | www.silverheights.cn |
| Best season | September to October, harvest |
| Wines to taste | The Summit (to understand Ningxia Cabernet); Family Reserve Chardonnay (to understand Ningxia whites); Bloom Sparkling (to understand the innovation) |
PLACEHOLDER:hero-silver-heights at the top. PLACEHOLDER:portrait-emma-thierry inside §1, Emma Gao and Thierry Courtade in the new Jinshan winery. PLACEHOLDER:photo-bloom-bottle inside §4, the Bloom Sparkling bottle. PLACEHOLDER:photo-amphora inside §4, the Chinese clay amphora orange-wine vessels.