Kanaan: Crazy Fang's Riesling on the Edge of the Gobi
A German-trained winemaker came home to Ningxia and planted Riesling in a desert. Then she made Cabernet that won 94 from Wine Advocate.
Crazy Fang
Section titled “Crazy Fang”Crazy Fang. The nickname spread internationally in 2014, when Jancis Robinson used it in a column. It refers to Wang Fang.
Crazy how? A woman who had built a comfortable life in Germany for twelve years went home to Ningxia and planted grapes on a stretch of Gobi that gets less than 200 mm of rain a year. No formal winemaking experience. Everyone around her thought she had lost her mind.
In 2019, her Crazy Fang Cabernet Sauvignon earned 94 points from Wine Advocate, one of the highest scores ever given to a wine from an independent Chinese family estate.
In Her Father’s Shadow
Section titled “In Her Father’s Shadow”Kanaan’s story cannot be told without Wang Fengyu.
Wang Fang’s father, Wang Fengyu, is a living archive of Ningxia’s wine industry. He is a co-founder of Helan Qingxue. He was the one who encouraged Liu Zhongmin to plant Legacy Peak’s original 1997 Cabernet. He himself started reclaiming saline ground on the east-foot of Helan in 2005. If you drew a map of the Ningxia boutique-wine network, Wang Fengyu would be one of the most central nodes.
Wang Fang went to Germany in 2000, to the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen. Twelve years there. She built a systematic understanding of global wine regions, with Riesling at its center. But what really changed her direction was a 2009 visit home and a single tasting.
She drank the Jia Bei Lan 2009 her father had helped make.
The bottle that, two years later, would win Best in Show at DWWA.
One taste in, she understood that Ningxia’s terroir potential ran far beyond what she had imagined. In 2011, she walked away from her German life, brought a German winemaker back with her, and founded Kanaan Winery in Helan county.
Kanaan is the Old Testament’s Canaan, the promised land, flowing with milk and honey. Wang Fang is a practicing Christian. She has said her biological father and her heavenly father are both part of the name’s meaning. The name is at once a confession of faith and a statement of belief in Ningxia’s terroir.
The Impossible Riesling
Section titled “The Impossible Riesling”Everyone said Riesling could not be grown in Ningxia.
The reasons were solid. Short growing season. Extreme climate, searing dry summers and severe winters. 200 mm of annual rainfall. The opposite of Riesling’s cool, damp German home along the Mosel and Rhine. Riesling needs a cool climate to hold its acidity, and a long ripening period to develop complexity. Planting Riesling in Ningxia, the line went, was like planting rice in the Sahara.
Wang Fang did not believe it. She had drunk Riesling for twelve years in Germany. She had a stubborn conviction about the grape. She set aside 1.3 of Kanaan’s 16.8 hectares for Riesling. Not much. Enough to prove a point.
The result surprised everyone. Kanaan’s Riesling shows lime, green apple, nectarine, and white flower; lively acidity; a soft finish; even a hint of the classic petrol note. The style is naturally different from Mosel, warmer, fuller, more rounded. But the identity and the quality both hold.
In the UK, Kanaan’s Riesling is distributed by Liberty Wines and retails between £15 and £20. For a Ningxia Riesling to have a place on a British specialist-merchant shelf is, in itself, an answer.
From Pretty Pony to Crazy Fang
Section titled “From Pretty Pony to Crazy Fang”Kanaan’s labels carry Wang Fang’s personality.
Pretty Pony is the workhorse: 90% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Merlot, twelve months in used French oak. The name is cute. The wine is not, disciplined structure, concentrated fruit. Decanter listed it among “Twelve Ningxia Wines Worth Tasting.”
Wild Pony stands for the wildness of Ningxia’s climate and the stubbornness of a winemaker working against difficult conditions.
Crazy Fang, once labeled Black Beauty, later renamed, is the estate’s prestige bottling. 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. “Elegance and power held in one frame; velvet entry; tannins precise and full of tension.” Words that would have been laughable around a Ningxia red ten years ago. Not anymore.
In November 2025, Kanaan held a six-vintage vertical tasting of Crazy Fang in Beijing: 2011 through 2019, lined up side by side. Verticals like this are rare in Chinese boutique wine. You need at least a decade of disciplined work before you have the right to do one.
What the 94 Means
Section titled “What the 94 Means”The Crazy Fang 2019 received 94 points from Wine Advocate, reviewed by Edward Ragg MW, the British Master of Wine who moved to Beijing in 2007 and was named Wine Advocate’s China reviewer in 2019.
What does 94 mean? In the Robert Parker scoring system, 93–96 is defined as extraordinary. A Ningxia Cabernet was rated extraordinary by the Parker team.
For context: the highest Wine Advocate score ever given to a Chinese wine is 95, for Ao Yun 2018, from Yunnan. Kanaan’s 94 sits one point behind. But Ao Yun is backed by LVMH’s capital and global network. Kanaan is a family estate of under 17 hectares, run by one “crazy” woman and a consulting winemaker, Zhou Shuzhen, who has been making wine in Ningxia for over thirty years.
One point of distance on the rating sheet. A gap of more than tenfold in resources.
Zhou Shuzhen: Ningxia’s Invisible Hand
Section titled “Zhou Shuzhen: Ningxia’s Invisible Hand”Zhou Shuzhen is everywhere in Ningxia winemaking and almost never publicly named.
She was originally a Chinese-literature teacher. In 1983, she was one of nine people selected for an early winemaking course in Changli, Hebei, one of the founding experiments of modern Chinese viticulture. A literature teacher became a winemaker.
She has now made wine in Ningxia for more than thirty years, working at older state estates like Xixia King and Guangxia. Today she is consulting winemaker at both Kanaan and Jade Vineyard. From literature teacher to consulting winemaker of two of Ningxia’s most respected boutique estates, that journey has taken forty years.
Zhou is, in a sense, a microcosm of Ningxia’s first-generation winemakers. They came from everywhere, teaching, farming, government, engineering. They learned by trial in a region with almost no inherited knowledge. They built their own winemaking language, year by year.
Second Tier
Section titled “Second Tier”Kanaan currently sits in the Second Tier of Ningxia’s classified-estate system.
Unlike Silver Heights, which is excluded from the classification because it does not run tourism, Kanaan chose to participate. This probably has to do with the estate’s hospitality build-out, a tasting center, an organic restaurant, even an inn. That said, day-to-day visits are still hosted by Wang Fang and her husband personally. No professional reception team. The owner of a Second Tier estate giving you the tour herself, something hard to imagine at a Bordeaux cru classé.
A Visitor’s Brief
Section titled “A Visitor’s Brief”| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Location | Helan county, on the east foothills of Mount Helan, Ningxia |
| Booking | Advance booking required. Hosted by the owner |
| Classification | Second Tier (Ningxia) |
| Facilities | Tasting room, organic restaurant, inn |
| Export | UK (Liberty Wines), Australia (Dan Murphy’s), Germany, Switzerland, Singapore |
| Must-taste | Crazy Fang (to understand the top of Ningxia Cabernet); Riesling (to understand another shape of Ningxia white); Pretty Pony (best value) |
A note on Crazy. Wang Fang has been called Crazy Fang for over a decade now, and she enjoys it. In a culture that prizes steadiness, crazy is a scarce quality. Without some of it, no one would have planted Riesling on the edge of the Gobi.