Helan Qingxue: The Bottle That Made the World Hear Ningxia
How the World Heard Ningxia’s Name
Section titled “How the World Heard Ningxia’s Name”I have already written about the night in 2011 that changed everything. Jia Bei Lan 2009 beat Bordeaux at London’s DWWA. But to tell that story properly, you have to go back further, back to 1983.
Because Helan Qingxue was not three people deciding to build a winery on a whim. The estate sits on top of two generations of work and twenty years of industrial groundwork.
The Iron Triangle
Section titled “The Iron Triangle”The three founders of Helan Qingxue are known in the industry as the Iron Triangle: Rong Jian, Wang Fengyu, and Zhang Jing.
None of the three had a formal winemaking background. But because of who they were, the estate was never going to be a casual venture.
Wang Fengyu was there at the beginning. In 1983, when Yuquanying State Farm planted Ningxia’s first commercial wine grapes on the eastern foot of Mount Helan, Wang was on site, at that time deputy director of the Agricultural Modernization Base Office under the Ningxia Science and Technology Department, responsible for site selection and nursery imports. Over the next two decades he came to know the founding figures of Chinese viticultural science: Professors He Puchao, Luo Guoguang, Li Hua. “Standing on the shoulders of those scientists, I also saw the potential of the eastern foot of Helan.”
Rong Jian spent the 1980s in the Ningxia Party Committee’s agricultural office, later transferring to the regional government. He met Wang during poverty-alleviation work and reunited with him through wine: in 1996, when Ningxia named wine one of its six pillar industries, Rong became deputy head of the industry leadership group and Wang its secretary general. Two years later, in 1998, a fresh agricultural-college graduate named Zhang Jing was assigned to the office as a junior staffer. “She was young, bright, and quick,” Wang remembered.
None of them imagined the vines along the eastern foot of Helan would tie their lives together for the next twenty-some years.
Walking Toward the Storm
Section titled “Walking Toward the Storm”The turn of the century was nothing like Ningxia’s polished present. The province had fewer than ten registered wineries, almost no name recognition, weak infrastructure. Farmers were uprooting vines.
The three were doing something else: building China’s first provincial-level wine industry association. Rong as chairman, Wang as secretary general, Zhang as deputy secretary general. In 2003, the association led the campaign that gave Ningxia · Helan Mountain East Foothills its national Geographic Indication protection, one of China’s first three wine GIs.
But the test was just beginning. In 2001, severe hail. Crop losses. In 2002, a brutal winter freeze killed vines outright. In 2003, SARS shut down the market and crashed grape prices. Three years in a row. Some quit. Some waited.
The three of them decided to build a winery.
In 2004, Rong and Wang were approaching retirement. Wang remembered something Professor Li Hua had said years earlier, looking out across the Helan plain: “When I retire, I want to plant a few hundred mu here, run a small winery, make a few tens of thousands of bottles a year. That’s the aristocratic life.” Said in passing. Heard with attention. After a research trip to France, the idea sharpened. “In a small region like Bordeaux, we saw dozens of world-famous estates, modest in scale but lasting for centuries. Ningxia has no estate like that. So let’s build one.”
Wang told Rong; they agreed immediately. Then they brought Zhang in. The younger Zhang gave up her civil-service post, with one condition: “When the time comes, you have to send me abroad to train.”
A senior at the Science and Technology Department tried to talk her out of it: “Zhang Jing, think about it. If this venture fails, your classmates and colleagues will all be department chiefs by then. You’ll regret it.” Zhang thought for a moment and answered, “I think it’ll work.”
A Name From the Eight Sights
Section titled “A Name From the Eight Sights”The estate is named after the first of Ningxia’s eight classical scenic sights: Helan Qingxue, “Snow Over Helan in Clear Weather.” On a June day, when the sky is cobalt blue, the dust-grey Helan peaks are still capped with remnant snow. The colour contrast is dramatic. The Ming-dynasty prince Zhu Zhan wrote of it: “All the eye sees is a silver world; all the head looks up to is a mountain of jade.”
Twenty years ago, wine brands in China leaned toward European-sounding names. The three founders went the other way. If the point was to make a winery that meant something for the region, the name should belong to the region. Rong, an amateur photographer, proposed Helan Qingxue. Quanqigou, the site of the original estate, happens to be one of the best viewing points for the snow that the name describes.
The name is a coordinate and an aesthetic statement. Zhang’s wines have followed that aesthetic: plenty of sunshine without losing acidity, concentration without bulk.
Five Hundred Tons of Slag
Section titled “Five Hundred Tons of Slag”Spring 2005. The first boutique winery on the eastern foot of Helan broke ground. Bulldozers and dust.
Rong photographed almost every stage. The early photographs show land indistinguishable from the Gobi: pale, alkaline, sparsely vegetated. Wang remembered: “At noon we’d boil a pot of noodles at the site. A gust of wind would come through before you could put the lid on, and the pot would turn into a basin of sand and ash. We’d send someone to buy steamed buns and eat them with the workers.”
Rong was a hands-on builder. Once he fell off a fermentation tank and broke a bone in his foot. He spent the next weeks on crutches, still driving back and forth to the site every day. No days off.
But the real adversary wasn’t the conditions. It was the soil.
In 2006, the estate imported fourteen vine selections from France. In the first year, almost every vine died. The salinity was too high.
What did they do? The estate took on a Ningxia University research pilot, trucked in five hundred tons of desulfurization slag from a nearby power plant, and used it to neutralize the soil. Then years of green-manure crops, farm manure, sheep manure to rebuild organic matter. Many Ningxia estates have since copied the method.
Today, if you compare satellite images of the estate’s surroundings across twenty years on Google Earth, sand has retreated and green has spread. Like the Mu Us reclamation, like the Saihanba reforestation, this is another Chinese-style ecological turn. The estate is now a garden with two hundred-plus tree species, a pond where lotus and wild ducks share the water in summer, a dog running around the courtyard. The plan the two retiring officials sketched in 2004 is now visible from satellite.
Apprenticeship
Section titled “Apprenticeship”Zhang made one smart decision: she found a teacher.
Already during her association days she had won a training trip to the Rhône Valley. In the 2005 harvest she went to Domaine Franco-Chinois in Hebei for a two-month internship and asked Professor Li Demei, then head winemaker, to be her teacher. In 2008 the relationship formalized, Li Demei became the estate’s consulting winemaker. The arrangement has now run for more than fifteen years.
Rong is direct about it: it was Li Demei, along with professors Li Hua, Duan Changqing, Zhang Junxiang, and others, who kept the estate on the rails. “The winery’s path had almost no wrong turns. Without their help and support, Helan Qingxue would not be where it is.”
A side note on Wang Fengyu. He is not only a co-founder of Helan Qingxue; he is also a kind of seed-planter for Ningxia’s boutique scene. He served alongside Gao Lin, the founder of Silver Heights, in the same army unit decades earlier, and later helped Gao establish Ningxia’s first family winery beside the Tanglai Canal. He encouraged Liu Zhongmin to plant Legacy Peak’s original Cabernet in 1997. He talked his own daughter, Wang Fang, into leaving Germany to come back and start Kanaan Winery, which now produces what may be the best Riesling in China. A significant share of the human network in Ningxia’s boutique scene traces back to this one man.
Twenty-Three Hectares, Held
Section titled “Twenty-Three Hectares, Held”The thing I admire most about Helan Qingxue is not the DWWA gold. It is a number: twenty-three.
From founding in 2005 to the twentieth anniversary in 2025, Helan Qingxue’s planted area has remained the same twenty-three hectares. Not one mu of expansion.
This is an anomaly in Ningxia. Over the past fifteen years, the region has grown from a few thousand hectares to over forty thousand, with a government target of around sixty-seven thousand. Every estate has faced the temptation to scale up, government subsidies, available land, a market that wants more wine. Zhang did not move.
In 2013, the estate did open a roughly thirteen-hectare second vineyard about ten kilometers north of the original site, Huaxi Garden. Strictly speaking, this was an upgrade rather than an expansion: the Huaxi soils are markedly better than the original site, with layered fine sand, fine gravel, and coarse gravel over a meter thick, excellent permeability, and the land had been cultivated before, giving higher organic matter. Huaxi is now in full production, with quality and yield rising year over year.
Small and refined is a phrase the Chinese wine industry has worn out. Very few actually do it. Twenty years without scaling up, annual production held to fifty or sixty thousand bottles, that means you know every vine and every barrel at a level a thousand-hectare estate simply cannot.
7 September 2011, London
Section titled “7 September 2011, London”You have already read the outcome at the front of this book. But for the three people from Helan Qingxue, that evening was a completely different memory.
When Li Demei filled in the online entry form, Ningxia was not in the drop-down menu of Chinese regions. He emailed the organizers personally: the wine is from Ningxia. They added it.
The awards dinner was held at the Royal Opera House. Four Chinese faces stood out in the crowd.
Before the awards, the host pulled Li Demei aside to ask how to pronounce Rong Jian and Helan Qingxue. Zhang, the most extroverted of the three, immediately guessed: “Did we just win an international prize?” Rong smiled gently: “No way. Don’t get your hopes up.”
Then the host announced: “And the first-place winner is, from China, Helan Qingxue Estate, Jia Bei Lan, 2009.”
Rong walked to the stage, shook hands with the chair of the judging panel, Steven Spurrier, took the trophy, and said one thank you. In the audience, three faces carried the full weight of six years of building, twenty years of industry work, and five hundred tons of slag against alkaline soil.
Ripples
Section titled “Ripples”The prize was bigger news outside China than inside.
Deng Zhongxiang, then a Chinese winemaking intern in France, received the news and felt, in his own phrase, “the way the Tang poet did when news of victory reached him in exile, tears soaking the gown.” For years abroad he had been asked the same question by classmates and professors: China makes wine?
In 2017, Zhang Jing was invited to the Adelaide Wine Academy in Australia as a visiting winemaker. In the audience, a Chinese student listened with tears running down her face. Afterwards she found Zhang. “For a Chinese person to study winemaking abroad,” she said, “is like an American studying Chinese stand-up comedy. No matter how hard you work, you still feel like an outsider. Seeing a Chinese person stand at this lectern, I couldn’t help crying.”
Deng Zhongxiang eventually came back to Ningxia. In public talks he says directly: “I came back because of Jia Bei Lan.” In 2023 and 2025, two estates he advised, Lansai and Haiyue-Renhe, won DWWA Gold.
Every year, international wine groups, including the master’s class of the OIV, visit Ningxia. Helan Qingxue is always on the itinerary. A line on the reception-hall wall reads:
The world’s wine discovered the eastern foot of Helan from here.
A Personal Turn
Section titled “A Personal Turn”Recognition did not come with only roses.
Grapes were poached. Trademarks were filed maliciously. Counterfeiters used the Jia Bei Lan name to peddle fakes.
Zhang divides her own winemaking career into three phases.
| Phase | Years | What it was |
|---|---|---|
| Following | 2005–2011 | ”Mostly copying. I rarely had my own ideas. I didn’t dare to do much that was original.” |
| Bottleneck | 2011–2014 | ”The other side of recognition is pressure. Those years I was tangled and struggling.” |
| Becoming herself | 2014–present | ”Balance, restraint, expressing terroir, expressing the kind of restrained, elegant, complex thing I want. I have to become myself.” |
She describes the transition as her Longchang Awakening, a reference to the Ming-dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming, who, exiled to a remote outpost called Longchang in 1508, broke through to a new system of thought. The phrase has the weight of a personal philosophical rupture, not just a stylistic adjustment. For two or three years Zhang trial-blended, rejected, re-blended, until the Jia Bei Lan 2014 felt right.
Picking Early, Less Oak
Section titled “Picking Early, Less Oak”Zhang has been quietly leading a stylistic shift in Ningxia.
Early Chinese reds had two chronic problems: over-ripeness and over-oak. Winemakers chased high sugars, high alcohol, dark color, then layered new oak on top to “elevate” the wine. The result was thick, identical, vanilla-scented bottles that smelled like a furniture shop.
Zhang went the other way. Pick earlier. Use less new oak.
Earlier picking preserves natural acidity and brightness. Less new oak lets the fruit and the place speak instead of hiding behind vanilla and toast.
This direction looked ahead of its time fifteen years ago, part of why Jia Bei Lan 2009 won was precisely that it avoided over-ripeness and over-oak. Today more Ningxia winemakers are converging on the same logic. Zhang is not a slogan person. She lets twenty years of vintage data and what is in the glass argue for her.
The equipment has also moved with the philosophy. Old fermentation tanks have been converted to storage. New fermenters are French-design trapezoidal vessels. Impeller pumps replaced by peristaltic pumps. Pneumatic press and cooling systems added for parcel-by-parcel temperature control and cold maceration. All of it in service of picking earlier, using less oak.
Baby Feet
Section titled “Baby Feet”Baby Feet is the estate’s second independent label, after Jia Bei Lan. The origin story is unusually personal.
2009 was a particular year for Zhang. She had two children at once: the soon-to-be-historic Jia Bei Lan 2009 in barrel, and her newborn daughter. Caught up in new-mother joy, she stamped her daughter’s name and a small footprint onto the barrel. The label was born.
In 2011, Jancis Robinson visited China and stopped at Helan Qingxue. The estate was small and barely known. There weren’t many wines. But she gave the Baby Feet 17.5/20, an unusually high score. On the strength of that bottling, Helan Qingxue became one of the first Chinese estates included in The World Atlas of Wine.
The Baby Feet series has since become the estate’s experimental ground: Malbec, Pinot Noir, wild-yeast fermentations. Some experiments don’t quite land. Some open new doors.
The Baby Feet Pinot Noir earned 94 points from James Suckling. A wine built on freshness and detail, in a register entirely different from those early heavy Cabernets.
The Wines
Section titled “The Wines”| Wine | Note |
|---|---|
| Jia Bei Lan Grand Reserve | Flagship. Cabernet-led blend, 100% new French oak. The 2009 was the bottle that changed everything |
| Jia Bei Lan Reserve | Second wine. The 2015 won DWWA Gold at 95 points |
| Reserve Chardonnay | James Suckling 92. “Refined nose of cream, roasted hazelnut, lemon sponge, brioche.” |
| Baby Feet Pinot Noir | The brightest recent wine. JS 94. The legendary 17.5 from Jancis Robinson |
| Baby Feet Marselan | Single-variety Marselan; Ningxia is increasingly committed to this grape |
| Petit Manseng Late Harvest | Sweet white. Petit Manseng is a southwestern French sweet-wine grape; Zhang has brought it to Ningxia |
| Traditional-Method Sparkling | Forthcoming. If the quality holds, this will be another Ningxia milestone |
| Hongshu Twentieth-Anniversary Edition | Led by Li Demei; a super-blend of four select Jia Bei Lan vintages, 2005–2014 |
Zhang is also trialing Grenache. She thinks that, as climate shifts, Ningxia’s 2024 rainfall hit 600 mm, three times normal, the region needs to build a varietal reserve for the future.
2024: The Test Year
Section titled “2024: The Test Year”2024 was a brutally hard year for Helan Qingxue.
Ningxia’s normal annual rainfall is around 200 mm. In 2024 it reached 600. Three times. Harvest had to be brought forward sharply; the winemaker raced the curve between sugar spike and acid collapse. For a region built around aridity, the sudden flood meant canopy management, ventilation, mildew prevention, challenges that had simply not been part of Ningxia’s playbook. Overnight, they became required courses.
Zhang’s response: more attention to vineyard management, a serious re-think of canopy structure, faster introduction of more adaptable varieties like Grenache.
No blaming the weather. No labeling the year a disaster.
Better, Slower, Longer
Section titled “Better, Slower, Longer”Off the government order book, Helan Qingxue is in some ways moving more steadily.
In 2019, the estate signed an exclusive on-trade distribution deal with Kerry Wines, the wine arm of the Shangri-La Hotels group. That deal opened the wine list at Shangri-La, Marriott, Hyatt, and many Michelin and Black Pearl restaurants. In 2021, it entered the OLE premium-supermarket chain operated by China Resources, with Shenzhen as a launchpad into Southeast Asia. In Singapore, the wine writer Joseph Chuang has championed it; the estate now has a loyal local audience there. Exports are about 15% of production: UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macao among them.
“For mature international markets, Ningxia wine is still a child just walking out the door.” That is Zhang’s framing.
As Rong and Wang have aged, Zhang has taken full operational charge as general manager. Rong puts it lightly: “You help someone onto the horse, and then you ride alongside them a bit longer.”
Better, slower, longer, that is how the three of them describe what they want for the estate’s future.
A note on price: Helan Qingxue’s top wines (Jia Bei Lan Grand Reserve in particular) now sit firmly around US$200 retail. That is high for Chinese wine, but in line with the quality and the historical position. The price reflects the wine and twenty years of work in a place that, in 2011, was not on Decanter’s drop-down menu.
PLACEHOLDER:hero-helan-qingxue at the top. PLACEHOLDER:portrait-iron-triangle near §1, the three founders together. PLACEHOLDER:photo-quanqigou-then-now inside §5, split image, 2005 saline soil vs 2025 garden estate. PLACEHOLDER:photo-2011-london inside §7, the moment Rong Jian receives the trophy from Steven Spurrier.