Shangri-La Wine Journey: Eight Wineries at the Top of the World

Your guide and wine team leader meet you at Lijiang airport in the morning for the drive north — about four hours, climbing from the Lijiang basin through the gorge country of the upper Yangtze onto the Tibetan plateau at Shangri-La, 3,200 metres up. The afternoon is the Shangri-La Winery, where this story starts: the company planted the Deqin highlands' first wine grapes in 2000, when the vines went up the valleys by yak, and its 圣域 wines still come from vineyards at 2,300 metres and above under the Meili snow mountains. A first tasting, from the Cabernet reds to its Chardonnay and the highland barley wine, then a welcome dinner in town. An early night: the altitude is easier if the first evening is quiet.

The road drops off the plateau into the Tacheng valley, a warm pocket of terraces, walnut trees and Tibetan farmhouses at about 2,000 metres where the Lisu, Naxi and Tibetan worlds meet. A walk through Hada village first, then Lapu Valley, the winery founded here in 2010 that grows one grape, Vidal, and makes ice wine from it: the bunches are left on the vine into winter until they freeze solid in the cold valley nights, then picked and pressed frozen, so the little juice that runs is intensely sweet. You taste the results with the winemaker's team. Tacheng is also known across the plateau for Reba, a Tibetan dance tradition on China's national intangible-heritage list — the evening is a performance around the fire, and dinner.

An early start for the monkeys: the Yunnan snub-nosed monkey lives only in these high forests between the Jinsha and the Lancang, and the reserve above Tacheng is the one place you can reliably see a troop — black-and-white, pink-lipped, at ease in the fir trees. Then about four hours over the ridges into the Lancang valley, breaking the drive in a Lisu village on the way. Cizhong is where this region's wine really began: French missionaries built the church here after their earlier mission at Cigu was burned in 1905 — the brick-and-timber building, Gothic outside and Chinese inside, was blessed in 1911 — and planted a grape the village still calls Rose Honey, 玫瑰蜜, which has vanished almost everywhere else. At the Cizhuo family winery you taste what the village still makes from it. Mass is said in the church in the evening, in Tibetan and Chinese, and you are welcome to sit in.

North up the Lancang, with the Meili range closing in. Simang farms about a hundred mu of vines — organic, low-yielding, broken into more than fifty small plots scattered across the villages of the Meili wine region — and is known for a Chardonnay that tastes of its altitude: snowmelt water, steep sun, thin air. Yueqi is the opposite end of the story, a winery still taking shape; you visit it in harvest season, at Bucun, the vineyard where the first vines in the Meili region were planted, and sit down with the independent winemaker who is building it. Then the climb to Feilai Si, the village of guesthouses and stupas at 3,560 metres that looks straight across the valley at Kawagarbo and its glaciers. Dinner at the hotel, and an early alarm.

Up before the light for the sight the whole plateau comes here for: the sun catching the summit of Kawagarbo, 6,740 metres and never climbed, and moving down the Meili peaks until the whole wall is gold. Breakfast, then the road back over the Baima Snow Mountain pass, above 4,000 metres, and down into the dry, warm Jinsha valley. Dongzhulin Monastery sits on the hillside above the road — a Gelug monastery of several hundred monks, its great hall held up on 82 timber columns — and is worth the hour. Duomu is the afternoon: a winery in an old Tibetan house at 2,800 metres, half an hour's drive up a track above Benzilan to where the road gives out, run by a winemaker who set out to make this region's first white-only estate. You taste the whites on the terrace, and talk about how a wine life fits into a Tibetan village. Two nights in Benzilan on the Jinsha.

A slower day, all of it around Benzilan. The morning is a walk in the old forest on the slopes above the valley, then a workshop where Tibetan incense is still rolled and dried by hand. Hachong village holds the day's two wineries. ZAXEE takes its name from the walnut tree at its gate, about five hundred years old; it makes fewer than twenty thousand bottles a year, and its oak-aged Chardonnay won 97 points and a gold medal at the Wynn Signature Chinese Wine Awards. A few minutes away, Zuishengmeng grew out of an abandoned rammed-earth Tibetan house on the Yunnan–Tibet road and is now a vineyard, a cellar, a small guesthouse and a wine restaurant in one — the place for the last tasting of the week, and a long dinner.

The river is at its best first thing, when the light comes down the gorge and the water goes from grey to gold; a last walk along it before breakfast. Then about two hours back up to Shangri-La for a midday or afternoon flight. If you would rather fly out of Lijiang, the drive continues south, about four hours more, with the wine team leader's case recommendations and a stop for lunch on the way.