One month ago, 60 finalists were picked for the second Ningxia Winemakers Challenge (see here), a project in which I am involved. While the challenge, which has a prize pool of rmb840,000 this time around, officially starts on September 20, a half-dozen winemakers arrived in the capital city of Yinchuan today to take part in the Ningxia wine festival.

Over the next few days, they will tour wineries and vineyards, meet officials and trade people, try plenty of wines and no doubt get their fill of mutton during the next few days, and I’ll put up a few posts about those activities. Expect even more when dozens of additional winemakers show up in two weeks time. It’s going to be a challenge both for them and for the organizers given the enormous scale of this project.

Here’s a photo from the 2012 challenge:

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