A Month in China! Beijing: The Wall and The Winery!

Wine tasting at the Changyu Winery!

The Great Wall

The Great Wine: Changyu Wine Chateau

Wine Tasting at Changyu

For anyone contemplating a trip to China, walking The Great Wall is a "Must-Do", even if you just walk a bit of it, and so it was absolutely essential I find us a great tour that would enable us to have this "bucket list" experience during our month in China. The Great Wall, constructed over a period spanning 2,500 years, from 770 BC to 1878, is over 13,000 miles long, visible from outer space, and is truly one of The wonders of the man-made world that merits the term "awesome"! Much of The Great Wall that is visible today was built during the Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644), and there are many different sections where you can walk or hike a part of it, the most popular being Badaling and Mutianyu, as well as Jinshanling and Simatai, which are more difficult. Some portions are rougher and harder to tackle than others- if you are planning to walk The Great Wall, do some research to find the area that suits you (and your hiking abilities) best! I read descriptions of EVERY tour of the Great Wall I could find, as many tours include other things in addition to The Great Wall, and I made a "short list" of the ones that seemed to provide the most interesting experiences. In so doing, I came across a truly unique-sounding private tour on the Viator website: after walking the Mutianyu portion of the Great Wall, you go to the Changyu Winery, a European-style winery set in the middle of the Chinese countryside, complete with vineyards and a turreted castle, for a wine-tasting! There was only ONE tour that went to the winery, and NO reviews online, and I, frankly, had my doubts... but Chef Dan wanted to go, and it turned out fabulous!  This VERY unique and excellent tour is called Mutianyu Great Wall Visit and Changyu Chateau Tour with Wine Tasting, and it's given by beijingtour-guide.com Picked up at our hotel by our charming and fun guide, Ju-An, and a driver at 8a.m., we were driven in an AbFab state-of-the-art Buick SUV to the Mutianyu section of The Great Wall, which has watchtowers distributed along it. It is one of the best-preserved sections of The Great Wall, and renovated, thus making it safer and easier to climb, and it's only about 40 miles (it took us 1.5 hours) from downtown Beijing. We took the cable car up and down- they won't let anyone over 55 take the rope lift up or the fun luge down, which we were looking forward to. :-( But there was a HUGE upside to taking the cable car: we got SUPER lucky, and got to ride in Melania Trump's cable car! (There were also two other cars that Mooch and Slick Willy had ridden in, and on the way down we deliberately avoided riding in either. After we explained why, our guide literally grabbed me by the arm so I wouldn't accidentally enter O's car. LOL (We also had to explain Bozo Biden The Creepy Groper to her- and she was appropriately appalled. LOL) 

Mutianyu Section of The Great Wall

Map of the Mutianyu Section of The Great Wall

In our VERY special cable car!

How lucky can you get???!!!

From the cable car up to The Great Wall...

Comrades Dan and Elisse at The Great Wall!

Dan, on The Great Wall of China...

View from The Great Wall...

View from the Watchtower...

The Great Wall of China and Watchtowers

Dan up on the Watchtower at The Great Wall

We walked The Great Wall to Towers 14, 15, 16, and 17, where we climbed up the tiny stone stairwell to the top of the watchtower so we could survey our territory and make sure the invading Mongols were being kept at bay... (Note: If you ever have a burning desire to feel Really Really Really Out Of Shape, take a tour of the Great Wall of China. LOL)

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The Wall, from the Watchtower...

Dog Walking on The Great Wall of China!

My only regret was that, like all great, good things, it was over Way too soon! The Great Wall is an amazing and extraordinary creation, and something that has loomed large in my "travel dreams" for over 40 years... National Geographic has a lot to be responsible for! LOL To actually and finally see it snaking up and down in front of us, zigzagging across the mountains and over the land into the horizon, was wondrous... And like all wonderful travel experiences, it was all too short... We took the cable car back down, and Ju-An then took us for a truly delicious Chinese lunch at an obviously popular "family-style" Chinese-only restaurant in a small nearby town: We had a delicious hot cabbage dish with Sichuan peppercorns (which I love, as they do this "mouth-numbing" thing that as a Chili Head I find glorious!) to start, Beijing-style noodles with bean sprouts (which really Are different from Shanghai noodles!), totally wonderful braised green beans with diced pork and more Sichuan peppercorns and hot peppers, and a delish, spicy  "authentic" Kung Pao Chicken- something we Never order in USA Chinese restaurants! LOL We were also served wedges of a scrumptious, multi-layered hot pancake very much like Israeli-Yemenite Melauach, and Jasmine Tea so intensely fragrant I wanted to wear it as perfume! 

Delicious, spicy Hot Cabbage...

Ju-An and our Chinese Lunch Feast!

After lunch it was time to drive to the truly surreal Changyu Wine Chateau: a huge, European, turreted castle built in China in the 1860s, its vineyards produce some of China's finest wines! This was another one of the "Chinese-only" experiences I managed to find for us, thanks to 2+ months of OCD trip research! There is NO signage in English at the winery (save for the museum exhibits), and NO ONE speaks English! Save for a handful of Presidents (they had a big display of visits by O, Bozo Biden, Putin, and others), we may have been their only Western visitors! 

The Changyu Wine Chateau

My idea of a bottle of wine! LOL

Dan and the Changyu vines!

Welcome to the winery!

The Changyu Wine Chateau

Chardonnay Road!

After I booked the tour I began to research Changyu online, and found this Wikipedia entry,  a few interesting articles, and several reviews of their wine, such as this one on Snooth, and this one in The Guardian, all quite good. Changyu was founded in 1892 by Mr. Chang Bishi,  and after 125 years, Changyu remains the largest wine production enterprise in China-  perhaps even in all of Asia! When Zhang Bishi built his winery in Yantai in 1892, there was little to be found there but a few edible grapes. He first brought 2,000 plants from the United States, but few of them bore fruit, and they were not sweet enough- and half of the vines rotted away before harvest! He then bought 640,000 more plants from Europe, but even these found difficulty growing in Chinese soil- only about 30% of them survived. Zhang Bishi- determined to make a go of this- then sent for wild plants from northeast China, plants that produced a bitter fruit. These were grafted to the European plants, and, after three years, they were planted in the Shandong vineyards. The new vines survived, and bore grapes rich in sugar, with good color, and the plants were insect, disease, and cold resistant. Zang Bishi for the Win!

The Changyu Winery

The Grand Cellar (which we were in), was first built in 1894, and though rebuilt several times, it's lasted for more than 100 years, and is considered a great historical landmark of Chinese architecture, its creative design and construction work praised by both Chinese and foreign engineering experts. The Grand Cellar is 1,976 square meters by 7 meters, and one meter below sea level. It thus maintains a constant temperature and humidity throughout the year, and is ideal for wine maturation. It's still very much in use today, filled with thousands of huge oak barrels arranged around the cellar; three of the barrels are large enough to store 15 tons of wine each!

In the Cellar of the Changyu Wine Chateau!

The VERY cool handrail going down to the cellar...

At the start of our tour we were gifted with little bottles of Changyu brandy that we got to bottle ourselves and seal with a red velvet hammer! 

Bottling our brandy...

We had a tour of the grounds (which will be Gorgeous come spring...), their huge, deep-underground wine cellar, and the Chateau's Museum...

In the Museum...

You can't make this stuff up, kids...

In the Museum...

Now That's a still! WV meets China!

We then enjoyed a tasting of 4 of their wines. We opted to buy a couple of extra glasses of wine, bought 3 bottles (two of which came in numbered, wooden crates, and which we had a heck of a time jamming into our suitcases LOL), and hung out with Ju-An in the Tasting Room until they turned off the lights! :-)

Wine Tasting...

Wine Tasting at the Changyu Wine Chateau

Wine Tasting at Changyu!

Dan and Ju-An, with our Changyu Wine!

All in all, this was a fabulous day; this tour afforded us the opportunity to enjoy two things that are truly and uniquely Chinese: The Great Wall and Great Wine! 






Next up: Learning to make Chinese Dumplings!