I went back to China earlier this month after a gap of five years. Visitors of a more serious bent may go to China in search of answers to the future the planet. I went in search of wine.

On my first forays in 2002 and 2003 I had been struck by the relatively low quality of Chinese wine and by what an extraordinarily high proportion of it tasted like very, very thin, not quite clean, red bordeaux. Wine made from grapes was still a pretty marginal phenomenon in China five years ago but, in the meantime, China has become the world's sixth most important grower of grapevines. The number of Chinese with aspirations to a western lifestyle has, to use a hackneyed but in this case thoroughly justified phrase, grown exponentially. And wine is now seen as an increasingly familiar accoutrement to that lifestyle.