Wine in Chinese culture.

Richard Hemming MW, writing on JancisRobinson.com in 2019, attributes the early popularity of red wine in China to three things together: an auspicious colour, the desirability of the brand, and gifting. Terroir, and vintage, sat behind that, he writes, unless a lucky eight was involved. After anti-corruption measures, he writes, gifting was outlawed, and red wine then established itself as a more ordinary drink. White wine and rosé were growing, and still accounted for only a third of imported wine sales.

That is the sourced answer. Red has been the gift, and the colour is part of why. A lucky eight is the number he names, and he names it of a vintage, not of a rule that a guest must bring eight bottles. These essays do not state that four is an unlucky count of bottles, or that a particular wrapping, ribbon or handover is required. They also do not set out a protocol for Chinese New Year or the Mid-Autumn Festival. A guest who needs that protocol should not take it from this page.

Hemming’s 2020 column, reporting Edward Ragg MW, says that before the anti-corruption crackdown, sales to local government officials were an easy source of income, and that wineries then had to reach drinkers themselves. A bottle offered to an official is a different act from a bottle offered to a friend. The essays do not collapse the two.

Andrew Jefford, in Decanter, described formal and business meals along the Yellow River, in Ningxia and in Wuhai, as the meals at which wine was served. The host and the leading guests walk the table proposing toasts. The other guests get up to answer. When the toast is made around the whole table, a guest who cannot reach the glass opposite taps theirs against the revolving disc in the middle, which he says is usually glass.

He is explicit about ganbei. There is no need to drain the glass if you do not hear the words. At the banquets he attended, the staff poured about one large sip at a time and expected that sip to go at the next toast. Sipping along with the food, in the Western way, he calls impolite in that room: the wine is drunk standing, after the speech, not as a private accompaniment to a dish. He also writes that the government has encouraged wine, putaojiu, in place of the stronger spirit, baijiu.

Hemming’s 2019 column says the same thing more shortly. At a traditional banquet, ganbei toasting might mean the wine is downed rather than sipped, and many dishes arrive together. He has heard of a premium Australian Shiraz served with abalone at the climax of a meal. He marks that as something he has heard.

Nick Lander, in a 2008 piece for JancisRobinson.com and the Financial Times, describes Beijing restaurants built with private rooms so a host can entertain business guests, and red-wine bottles left on the table because being seen to spend is part of face. An old Beijing hand told him that the custom of repeated toasts in very strong rice wine seemed to be fading. That is one person’s report of a change, not a rule that rice wine has gone.

None of these accounts describes a rule for the height of your glass against your host’s. If you have met that instruction elsewhere, it is not in the pieces this page uses.

A Western reader often wants a line for Cantonese food, a line for Sichuan, and a line for Shanghainese. The critics cited here do not publish that chart.

What they do say is about the shape of the meal. Jefford, eating in Ningxia, argues that matching one wine to one dish does not fit a table where several preparations share a plate. Hemming writes that a traditional banquet puts many foods out together, with little interest in the old European matching rules, and that the European classroom idea — Riesling or Gewürztraminer with “Asian cuisine” — is not how the wine is drunk in Asia. Lander’s Beijing piece is about rooms, duck and Sichuan heat. The heat, he writes, belongs to a damp landscape and to chillis. He does not name a wine for it.

Bring-your-own is equally local in the source. Jefford notes that Ningxia is known for its Hui Muslim minority, that many of the local restaurants do not serve alcohol, and that bringing your own did not surprise anyone. That is those rooms. It is not a corkage policy for Canton, Sichuan or Shanghai, and no such policy is printed in these essays.

The banquet above is recent. The fermented drink is not. Residue in pottery from Jiahu, in Henan, points to a mixed drink of rice, honey and fruit — hawthorn, grape, or both — by about 7000 BC. Patrick McGovern and colleagues called it the oldest chemically confirmed alcoholic beverage then known. The paper is in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2004. A second paper, in Asian Perspectives in 2005, finds a mixed fermented drink at Liangchengzhen, on the Shandong coast.

The same PNAS paper reports liquids sealed in Shang and Western Zhou bronze vessels and reads them as cereal drinks. Grape wine, as distinct from those older mixtures, enters the standard account after Zhang Qian’s missions west in the second century BC. McGovern’s Ancient Wine is the book-length treatment this site uses for that claim. Wang Han’s Tang poem “Liangzhou Ci” puts grape wine in a luminous cup, the 夜光杯. Dongfang Yuxing’s Best in Show wine takes its name from that image. Decanter China is the source for the name on the modern bottle.

Jefford, leaving those Ningxia tables, allows himself one historical sentence: “This, perhaps, is the way wine has always been drunk along the hazardous Silk Road.” He marks it as a perhaps. The chemistry at Jiahu is a different drink from the Cabernet on the table. The line between them is the point of the history page.