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Chris Ruffle needed to ensure the contractor building his Scottish castle in China’s Shandong Province finished the job. When his own efforts failed, Ruffle called on political contacts he had spent years courting to apply some pressure. In one instance an official from Yantai, a nearby coastal town, came by to help. When Ruffle thanked her, she responded: “Handbags.” “Handbags?” he asked. “Yes, Handbags.” So Ruffle sent his sister off to buy some designer handbags and, as instructed, included the invoice in the delivery, so the official could verify the goods weren’t knock-offs.

The official’s pressing need for designer goods was one of many humorous (if-it-wasn’t-happening-to-you) incidents Ruffle endured in the decade he spent creating a vineyard and Scottish castle in the rolling granite soil of eastern China. The diary notes he kept as he got to know village heads and local farmhands and learned the hard way how things really get done in China were published earlier this month in a brief, entertaining book he called “A Decent Bottle of Wine in China.”

Chris Ruffle - CEO of Open Door Capital Management and owner of Treaty Port Vineyard in Shandong Province.

Ruffle, originally from Yorkshire, England and co-founder and CEO of Open Door Capital Management, a Shanghai-based investment firm, didn’t need to go on this improbable journey. It’s still a little unclear why he would as problem after problem piled up. But the idea was planted when Ruffle met French winemaker Gerard Colin on a visit to Grace Winery in Shanxi Province in 2004. Colin, Grace’s winemaker at the time, described “a lovely valley by a lake” in Shandong as a place far more ideal for a vineyard than the dusty coal region of Shanxi.

Ruffle ended up hiring Colin, originally from St. Emilion in Bordeaux, as his first winemaker. But that lasted less than two years. Stories of winemakers, managers and cooks going through a revolving door as the project progressed are also among the tales Ruffle spins. It’s a wonder that the turreted castle, which functions as a hotel and restaurant as well as a winery, got built and that “a decent bottle of wine” was ever made.

You could be forgiven for asking why an English entrepreneur would undertake this. But when Ruffle, who has lived and worked in Asia for most of the past 30 years, first got a look at the Qiushan valley spreading out from the hillside to a large lake in the distance, he was reminded of a recent trip to the “castle-dotted mountains of Northern Spain, its granite bones jutting out from beneath the fresh green summer grasses.” Oddly enough, he had experience building a castle, or rather restoring one as closely as possible to historical standards, near St. Andrews University in Fife, Scotland.

Ruffle didn’t have to wrestle with Scotland’s Historic Scotland body in Shandong, as he did when restoring Dairsie Castle in the mid-1990s, yet building a castle in China presented plenty of obstacles.

If he knew at the beginning what he knows now, would he do it all again? He shook his head, no, saying, “It’s quite hard,” when asked at dinner at a Spanish restaurant in Hong Kong last month. Yet as a fund manager who has spent years examining companies as an outsider, he’s found it gratifying to produce something tangible. “My mother-in-law never understood what I did for a job,” says Ruffle. Now when he visits her in Taiwan he’s introduced as the winemaker.

Treaty Port Vineyard castle

At dinner his sense of pride was evident as he offered first the waiter, and then the owner, a sample of his best white and red. He would ask, “Would you like a taste of my wine? It’s produced by me. In Shandong.”

To make wine in China is no longer considered strange, and the product, in informed circles, is no longer assumed to be inferior. Grace Vineyards in Shanxi and Silver Heights in Ningxia are two of the more well-known names gaining international prominence. Ruffle calls his vineyard Treaty Port to evoke nearby Yantai’s history, where former British and U.S. consulate buildings still sit, and the bottles feature sepia-toned photographs of Westerners in China long ago.

Lady of Fashion, Treaty Port’s top white in 2014, is a blend of Chardonnay and Viognier grapes, that was pleasantly fruity, and a little sweet (thanks to the Viognier). The top 2014 red, dubbed The Prince, (and featuring a 1972 photo of a Prince Gong, who, according to the label, was “a proponent of friendly relations with the West and China’s modernization” is a mix of Petit Verdot and Arinarnoa. Arinarnoa is a cross of Cabernet Sauvignon and Tannat that Ruffle says had done particularly well in Shandong’s near-marine climate, despite the persistent sun needed for ripening the grape’s thicker skins. The reasonably well-structured red also tasted good after it had been in the glass a short while. I can comfortably say yes, he has made a decent bottle of wine, even two.

Treaty Port wines are meant to go well with Chinese food. The Prince’s label tells you to pair it with braised pork and Xinjiang roast lamb. One of Ruffle’s missions is to get Chinese consumers, famous for their love of pricey red Bordeaux, to consider white varietals. “There’s a big prejudice in China to drink red wine,” he says. “I’m trying to persuade them that certain things go better with white wine.”

Label for Treat Port’s top 2014 red featuring a 1972 photo of a Prince Gong.

The cost of Treaty Port’s reserve wines is CNY320 (about US$49) while its core wines, named Castle Red and Castle White, of course, are CNY180. Under the consistent oversight of Australian winemaker Mark Davidson, of Tamberlaine Wines, since 2000, Ruffle can now say they have a “good quality product.” With a happy result in 2014, and a promising harvest this year, Treaty Port is starting to look for distributors, mostly for restaurant use in Beijing or Shanghai.

The winery, and the small hotel in the castle, also may benefit as the Shandong region continues to attract attention as a wine destination. There are several wineries in the area and Ruffle’s neighbor, a joint venture between Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite) and Citic East China, is expected to soon produce commercially available wines. Lafite’s first test vintage was actually made in Ruffle’s castle (a victory, he says, for his “rural charity,” what his wife, Tiffany, has called the castle/wine project).

In what would seem to be the last straw, Ruffle learned in March 2014 that the government would build a highway between the castle and the lake below to create a north-south connection to the proposed, yet improbable, 76-mile-long cross-Bohai Strait tunnel project, which will connect Penglai, at the top of Shandong, with Lushun in Liaoning province. Treaty Port’s harvest was cut from 102 tons of grapes in 2014 to 84 tons in 2015 as the vineyard lost acreage to the new highway.

On the bright side, the winery isn’t losing a lot of money anymore and Ruffle, who is nothing but resilient, remains optimistic. He believes this all-consuming side project has “underlying value,” as only a fund manager would put it. “Maybe some billionaire will come along and buy a castle with a vineyard,” he offers. “I think that’s possible.’

Comments? E-mail us at abby.schultz@barrons.com

Comments? E-mail us at asia.editors@barrons.com