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Changyu Pioneer Wine Co. Inc., located in Yantai, Shandong, is China's oldest and largest winery. [1] It was founded in 1892 by Cheong Fatt Tze (Zhang Bishi).
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(March 2013) |
Changyu Pioneer Wine Co. Inc., located in Yantai, Shandong, is China's oldest and largest winery. [1] It was founded in 1892 by Cheong Fatt Tze (Zhang Bishi).
Zhang Bishi established the winery in Yantai in 1892. He bought 2,000 plants from the United States, but few bore fruit and were not sweet enough. As well, half of the vines rotted away before harvest, so he bought 640,000 more from Europe. Even these plants found difficulty growing in the foreign Chinese soil that only 20 to 30% of them survived.
In order to save the venture, Zhang sent for and brought back wild plants from northeast China, plants that produced a bitter fruit. They were grafted to the foreign plants and, after three years, they were planted in the Shandong vineyards. The new vines survived, granting fruit rich in sugar with good color and were insect, disease, and cold resistant.
Zhang Bishi's nephew Zhang Chengqing was the company's first general manager.
The Grand Cellar was first built in 1894. Although it needed to be rebuilt three times in the first 11 years, it has lasted for more than 100 years.
The Grand Cellar is 1,976 square metres in size and seven metres in depth. The ground of the cellar is one metre below sea level and the whole of the cellar is no more than 100 metres away from the sea. It maintains a constant temperature and humidity throughout the year and is ideal for wine maturation. Still in use today, thousands of oak barrels arranged around the cellar, with three of them large enough to store 15 tonnes of wine each.
