Sun Jian, general manager of Yantai Changyu Pioneer Wine, concurs that Ningxia, a promising wine region, might also have the most growing potential. "From our internal assessment, we believe that going out of Yantai, Shandong province, to invest in Ningxia is the correct decision."

He believes the pilot zone is a major opportunity that every practitioner must firmly grasp. To cope, Changyu has renewed the brand and renamed its winery in Ningxia Longyu through technological transformation.

In the next step, Ningxia plans to build a modern grape and wine industry area with a comprehensive output value of 100 billion yuan, 66,667-hectare planting area and an annual output of more than 300 million bottles of high-quality wine within five years.

If this goal can be achieved, the eastern foothill of Helan Mountain is expected to become one of the world's largest high-quality wine producing regions, a historic strategic opportunity for Chinese wine.

However, the development was particularly difficult. A "cold winter" last year due to the pandemic saw a decline of wine production. The National Bureau of Statistics says in 2020, 130 wine production enterprises above designated size completed production of 413,300 kiloliters, a year-on-year decrease of 6 percent; completed sales revenue of 10.021 billion yuan represented a decrease of 29.82 percent.

A differentiation strategy with focus on quality control of the entire chain and highlighting each chateau with their own flavor and characteristics is what Xu Kemin, chief economist of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, believes should be the new direction to offset the impact from the pandemic.