Xiaoling & Mingyi: A Burgundian Philosophy in the Himalayas
A Burgundian Philosophy in the Himalayas
Section titled “A Burgundian Philosophy in the Himalayas”If Ao Yun is Bordeaux’s projection onto Shangri-La, Xiaoling and Mingyi are Burgundy’s.
One management team. One winemaking philosophy. Different parcels. Xiaoling sits on 4.1 hectares, Mingyi on 7.1. Cabernet is blended; Pinot Noir is bottled by village; Chardonnay by single vineyard. Eight villages, more than twenty-seven micro-parcels, each picked and vinified separately. 100% wild yeast. 100% manual berry-crushing. Zero commercial yeast.
This is not winemaking. It is surgery.
Three People
Section titled “Three People”Bertrand Cristau, Lao Bai
Section titled “Bertrand Cristau, Lao Bai”Xiaoling’s story starts with the owner.
Bertrand Cristau, known in Chinese as Lao Bai, “Old White”, comes from the Bouchard family of Burgundy and has lived in China for forty years. He arrived in Shangri-La in 2012, not initially with winemaking in mind. He had heard about the Catholic history of Cizhong (see Cizhong & Rose Honey) and went to visit the village, intending to make a donation.
The idea shifted. Give a man a fish, or teach him to fish, Cristau decided to help the local community through winemaking. The first Xiaoling vintage came in 2014. Three thousand bottles.
Cristau inherited the Cizhong church’s vineyard, which gave him a thread running back a hundred and sixty years to the French missionaries. He has called making wine at Cizhong his destiny.
Sylvain Pitiot, The Clos de Tart Hand
Section titled “Sylvain Pitiot, The Clos de Tart Hand”Xiaoling’s consulting winemaker is Sylvain Pitiot, the former general manager and winemaker of Clos de Tart in Burgundy. Clos de Tart is one of Burgundy’s oldest monopoles, held by the Cistercian order since 1141. Pitiot worked there for years, retired, and was then invited by Cristau to Shangri-La.
A man who has made wine on seven-hundred-year-old vine stocks now consults in a region that started planting wine grapes twenty years ago. The asymmetry itself says something: Shangri-La’s terroir is persuasive enough to attract top Burgundy talent.
Feng Jian, From Adelaide to the Lancang
Section titled “Feng Jian, From Adelaide to the Lancang”Feng Jian is the chief winemaker for both Xiaoling and Mingyi, and the working lead on both projects.
In 2014, in South Australia at the Adelaide Wine Academy, Feng had a chance to come to Shangri-La for harvest. He went. Five years later, in 2019, he founded Mingyi here, focused on Pinot Noir and the older Chardonnay blocks. In 2020, Cristau invited him to take over as Xiaoling’s chief winemaker.
“The two wineries are a long-term partnership, same management, same team. The difference is in the parcels.” That is Feng’s framing.
His background is genuinely international. From 2020 he has worked with the Clos de Tart team on multiple vintages, and as he says, “all the imprints will fuse.” He has explicitly given up product consistency. He lets every village speak in its own voice. “This village is what it is, that’s what it should be.”
He spends most of his time in Shangri-La.
Surgical Winemaking
Section titled “Surgical Winemaking”The way Xiaoling and Mingyi make wine may be the most hands-on, hand-built operation in the Chinese wine industry today.
100% wild yeast. No commercial yeast. Feng says: “We only use SO₂.” The only human chemical intervention in the entire fermentation is sulfur dioxide.
100% manual berry-crushing. Not de-stemming, individual berry crushing, each berry split by hand by a worker. Mechanical intervention is almost nil. The labor comes from local villagers, many of them Catholic parishioners from Cizhong.
De-stemming uses mechanical assistance. Feng has acknowledged the one concession: local labor capacity cannot sustain fully manual de-stemming.
Mingyi does it similarly but not identically. “The technique is the same; the adjustments are minor.” Mingyi uses 20–30% whole-cluster fermentation. Xiaoling adjusts by vintage and parcel.
2,100 to 2,850 Meters
Section titled “2,100 to 2,850 Meters”Xiaoling and Mingyi’s vineyards cover a vertical span of 750 meters.
At the lowest, around 2,100 meters near the Lancang River, Cabernet Sauvignon thrives in the relative heat. Cabernet is usually picked earliest, around 15 September.
At the highest, 2,850 meters, the team grows Chardonnay. These are the last parcels harvested, the whites come in after the reds, contrary to Burgundian instinct.
The middle band is Pinot Noir. Feng has planted more than a hundred Pinot Noir clones, managed by village. Pinot Noir is bottled village by village, one wine per village.
Cabernet is the only variety blended across parcels. Everything else stays village-specific or parcel-specific.
Xiaoling holds aside a few exceptional single-vineyard lots, about sixty bottles a year, released only as small sets, mostly as an internal archive and research record.
Vintage variation is real:
| Vintage | Alcohol |
|---|---|
| 2020 | 14.8% |
| 2021 | 13.5% |
| 2022 | 14.0% |
A 1.5-percentage-point spread across three years is substantial. Feng does not paper it over. He does not chase a consistent house style. “We do not pursue product consistency.” He has said this plainly more than once.
A 97 for the Chardonnay
Section titled “A 97 for the Chardonnay”In 2022, James Suckling awarded Xiaoling’s Hongpo Chardonnay 97 points.
His note: “The most impressive white wine ever from China, a Chardonnay masterpiece with unmatched flavor depth, woven acidity, and refined minerality.”
A year earlier, the 2021 Xiaoling Chardonnay had been named his China White of the Year.
Ian D’Agata at TerroirSense has reviewed multiple Xiaoling vintages and called them world-class. He noted something specific about the Xiaoling reds: that they drink more like Pinot Noir or old-vine Schiava than Cabernet, an unusually telling comment for a Cabernet-led wine.
Chardonnay has become Xiaoling’s loudest international calling card. But Feng says he will not “push white planting aggressively.” Everything follows parcel. What suits a village is what gets planted.
No Tourism
Section titled “No Tourism”Xiaoling does not open to wine tourism.
The estate hosts journalists, and otherwise “basically zero.” No tasting room, no visitor route, no walk-in bookings. Feng’s reason is direct: “We can’t dilute too much energy into hospitality.”
His framing for tourism is precise: “Making great wine is our first tourism.”
The refusal looks like Ao Yun’s but the motive is different. Ao Yun is closed as a luxury strategy, scarcity creates desire. Xiaoling is closed because the team is too small and the work is too much.
Sales go through Xiaoling’s own channels. Xiaoling and Mingyi operate separately. Restaurants are the key route. Export already covers Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Provence, the UK. Feng estimates he has visited Shanghai for events no more than three times.
Mingyi: 7.1 hectares, a few thousand bottles a year. Two price levels, ¥780 and ¥1,480, depending on village and vine age. Adong’s wines are the more accessible. Jiangpo’s run higher, because the vines are older.
Local Logic
Section titled “Local Logic”It took Feng a long time to figure out how to work with local villagers.
He is candid: “Early on we didn’t understand. We made plenty of mistakes. We understand them now. The emotional bond matters. Inclusion, friction, patience, stepping back. The neighbor relationship, from total mutual misunderstanding, to a working relationship, to real understanding, to becoming local.”
In the early years, vine planting was driven by government policy, beginning around 2002, with technical advisors brought in. Land belongs to the villagers; the estate pays rent and labor. Over-yielding leads to wage deductions, to control quality. The execution is not always smooth.
Feng’s summary: “Farming is a year-by-year thing. See next year. Don’t chase change too much.”
That slow philosophy carries through to his winemaking. No chasing a breakout vintage. No maximizing scores. Do one year’s work in one year.
In October 2025, the French ambassador visited the region; Xiaoling was on the itinerary. A French owner making wine the Burgundian way in a Tibetan area receiving the French ambassador, at one level, a form of coming home.
Two Estates, One Reading
Section titled “Two Estates, One Reading”Xiaoling and Mingyi are not two brands. They are two experiments in the same reading of place.
Xiaoling is more mature, better-known to the market, with the louder labels. Mingyi is younger and more exploratory, Pinot Noir and old-vine Chardonnay are its markers. They share a winemaker, a management team, and a hand-built philosophy. The difference is the parcels.
This is a deeply Burgundian way of thinking: the estate does not define the terroir; the terroir defines the estate. Each piece of land, each village, has its own voice. The winemaker’s job is to listen and translate.
Feng has worked in Australia, New Zealand, France, Italy. He calls his own background mixed. But after 2020, working alongside Clos de Tart, he says, “all the imprints will fuse.”
Fusion takes time. Shangri-La’s terroir takes time to be understood. Feng does not seem in a hurry.
PLACEHOLDER:hero-xiaoling at the top. PLACEHOLDER:portrait-bertrand-cristau inside §2, Cristau in the Cizhong vineyard. PLACEHOLDER:photo-2850m-chardonnay inside §4, the highest Chardonnay block.