The first annual China International Wine Forum was help recently in Beijing. It attracted most wine professionals from all over China and many parts of the wine producing world.

It was a good forum, which outlined the tremendous growth of China’s wine industry and the increased investment and involvement by domestic and outside players.

It was a good opportunity for me to meet winemakers and wine industry people from all over the world and make valuable contacts. I even had the chance to meet and chat with the president of the O.I.V. (International Organisation of Vine and Wine) Mr. Federico Castellucci. We discussed the present state of the Chinese wine industry and other issues.

The event was also an opportunity to discuss as an industry the setting up of a national icewine production standard. This is needed, as the present state of icewine production is a mess with countless “fake” icewines in existence in the market. I did a technical speech on the subject, which I think was well received.

China’s wine industry is attracting a lot of interest from outside. This is because it is growing at the fastest pace seen in history and is viewed as a way to absorb the large wine glut that now exists in parts of Europe and Australia. The increase in quality of Chinese wines and the large vineyard plantings will also start to make Chinese wines known outside of China.

The event was a success and will help put China on the world map in terms of being not only an important market but also a wine producing nation. This will become more and more important as time goes on. You should all start looking for good Chinese wines at a wine store near you…they are coming...

One of China’s largest and most lucrative industry is the pharmaceutical industry. This is obviously due to the sheer number of people here but I also think it is because of the ingrained habit of taking medicines for the simplest ills and aches. Basically, as soon as someone doesn’t feel good or has a bit of a soar throat, in goes the medicines.

Sometimes as soon as I cough (or even clear my throat) someone says “here, take some medicine!”. Anti-biotics are readily available without prescriptions at basically every street corner. Both western and traditional eastern medicines as well as herbal remedies are widely available.

When the average person has a cold, even a small one, they head for the nearest clinic to get a medicine drip. This “drip” is a bag of liquefied medicine that is injected into their veins. It takes about 3 hours to pass through and is done on three consecutive days. It obviously works wonders but my opinion on this varies. If everyone depends on anti-biotics to kill their viruses and never let their own bodies fight them off, doesn’t this compound the problem? Will this habit that the whole society has help generate “super bugs” that are immune to medicine? This being a densely populated country, having a whole bunch of “super bugs” running around, can’t be good. SARS a few years ago was a good example.

A friend of mine told me that in China we need to use strong medicine because the viruses here are stronger than in the west. I am not sure if this is really founded on fact but it does seem to indicate that doing this could be the start of a very nasty vicious cycle.

With that in mind, my little daughter Bella was sick this week. She had a cough and fever. We waited a couple of days to see if her cold would subside but it did not seem to and the fever reached 40’C. Fearing "super bugs", we did not want to take any chances and brought her to the clinic to get a “drip". She was not happy to say the least!

I don’t know what is in that medicine but it does work wonders. The very next day, she felt fine and is now as rambunctious as ever. What is a parent to do? We can say "oh taking too much medication is bad!" but when it is your own child that needs it, you end up doing what everyone else is doing.

Medicines are a good thing and obviously very useful in society but hopefully we are not creating a monster with its over-use…

We were in Ji’an County over the day and were able to learn a little about an old civilization that once rules in this area. I visited a couple ancient tombs and pyramids of some of the rulers of the Kogury empire. The area was a bit of a "Valley of the King's of the Ji'an Country. It was not something I expected to see as the tombs looked like they could have been something out of Mayan or Aztec history….

The whole area is quite beautiful. This is not a place that most foreigners think about visiting when coming to China as it is off the main travel circuit. However, it was very interesting nonetheless and most foreign visitors here are South Koreans as they believe that this area is the birthplace of their culture.

Here is a bit of a brief intro on the town and its history:

Ji'an City, located in the southeast of Jilin Province, lies opposite to the DPRK with the Yalu River running in between, borders Liaoning Province to the southwest, and neighbors Tonghua City and Baishan City of Jilin Province to the north. It is one of China's three major ports opened to Korea, and the main drag and window of economic, technological and cultural exchanges between China and the Korea Peninsula as well as the Northeast Asian Business Community. Under its jurisdiction there are one economic development zone, ten villages and towns, and three sub-district offices, with nine nationalities living in the city, including the Han, Korean, Manchu, Hui and so on.

The time-honored Ji'an City is ancient and mysterious with rich cultural heritage. In 37BC, Chinese northern ethnic minority, Kogury, set up its regime in the middle reaches of the Yalu River and the Hunjiang River valley. In 3AD, Kogury moved its capital to Guonei (today's Ji'an), which served as capital for the Kogury empire for 425 years.

I was in Jian today, which is a town on the border with North Korea. It was a beautiful day so I decided to rent a boat and take a short trip along the river separating the two countries.

As I ventured into the North Korean side of the river and very close to the shore I was able to spot numerous DPRK army personnel with machine guns patrolling the river shore. I presume to make sure none of its citizens have the strange idea of trying to escape to China and flee their crazy regime, extreme poverty and hunger. The boat driver mentioned that many people are shot every year trying to do just that and we should not get too much closer to the shore or we may face the risk of being at the receiving end of a North Korean bullet. I agreed with him and we headed back to China promptly after taking a few pictures.

The little of DPRK that I saw was very poor, no cars, signs, advertising of any kind, just a few army trucks speeding down dirt roads and mud brink homes. I did see a few people waving at us but their wave signified us to leave, not a “hello” type of wave. The whole feeling was just a bit creepy…

Going back towards China felt like a relief even though this part of China is also very poor, it looked like Disneyland compared to what I saw of North Korea.

After this short boat ride along the shores of North Korea, I enjoyed a nice meal and a beer by the Chinese riverside and felt thankful that I was lucky enough to have been born on the "other" side…