Even for a company with a history of international cooperation, Penfolds’ Chinese project marks a bold new departure. Nick Ryan heads to the Himalayas for the launch of its first exciting release.
Shangri-La is many things all at once.
A fiction made physical.
A Hollywood fantasy overlaid on a Chinese map.
A dream drawn by a desire to convince ourselves there could be some wriggle room on negotiating our mortality and a breathtaking landscape that can quickly and cruelly illustrate the futility of that thinking.
In James Hilton’s popular novel Lost Horizon and Frank Capra’s studio-straining film of the same name, Shangri-La is an isolated and temperate valley sheltered from the harshness of the Himalayas, so blessedly benign that galloping age slows to a languid crawl.
The name has now been co-opted for everything from billionaires’ beach-houses to luxury hotel chains; and in 2001, the Chinese authorities, with an eye to the tourism potential of package deals to Paradise, declared that Zhongdian County in the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwestern Yunnan Province would henceforth be known as Shangri-La.
And it’s working.
Spend some time wandering through Shangri-La’s well-preserved Old Town, where dozens line up to climb aboard wheezing yaks and mildly terrified children are pressed into photographs with Tibetan Mastiffs that could swallow them whole before falling back to sleep, and you are carried along by a wave of domestic tourism drawn to the region’s history, beauty, mild climate, and clean air.
And maybe one day, if the ambitions
This Article was originally published on World of Fine Wine
