The early morning fog floats away over the imposing Mount George, revealing Joe Chuang’s rows of Chardonnay vines running across the floor of Napa Valley. Short and neat in a dark corduroy jacket and blue striped shirt, Chuang surveys the vineyard from the balcony of a pale yellow, two-storey house.
Inside, the interiors are decorated with Chinese calligraphy; Chinese characters are written on bottles of his Firefly Vineyards wine. But outside, the 12-acre vineyard is sandwiched between fields (where a Texan cowboy is storing hay) and twee wooden Napa houses with US flags hanging from their porches.
Chuang frequently insists that he only makes wine as a “hobby”, with the profits going to fund education for underprivileged children in China. Yet with 5,000 cases a year to sell from Napa, another vineyard in China 20 times the size of this one, and a new non-profit organisation set up to promote Californian wine in China, it is hard to believe.