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Paper, cinnabar, and a name you can read.

Chinese Winery is an English directory of the estates Western critics write about. It is meant to be read from either side: the English a buyer already knows, and the Chinese a producer prints on the door.

The red and the gold

The red is cinnabar, 朱砂, the mineral ground for seal ink. It belongs to the same family as 中国红, the red of festivals, door couplets and good fortune. On these pages it is a magazine’s second colour: a link, a rule, the pins on the map, and the small seal beside the title.

The gold is the colour of an inscription that has worn back toward the paper. It is kept for the Chinese in the masthead, for a gloss on a few headings, and for the line of critics under the opening essay.

The square mark reads 中酒. It is a chop, the stamp that says a page belongs to this directory. It identifies the press. A score still has to come from a critic.

Names

A Chinese name is shown when it can be read on the producer’s own site, or, for a province, as the ordinary name of that place. Beside the characters is the Hanyu pinyin, with tones, so the English edition can be pronounced.

• 宁夏 Níngxià
• 山东 Shāndōng
• 云南 Yúnnán
• 新疆 Xīnjiāng
• 河北 Héběi
• 山西 Shānxī

Where a producer site could not be checked, the Chinese line is left blank. A critic’s spelling, or a name repeated on a shop page, stays out of the directory.

A Chinese edition

This is the English edition. The estate names, the pinyin and a short glossary of section titles — 名录, 产区, 旅游, 文化, 酒评, 历史, 阅读 — are already stored with the pages. A zh-CN edition will use that structure when its prose is written. Until then the site stays in English, and a Chinese URL is not advertised.