Treaty Port and Runaway Cow Ridge: Chris Ruffle's Two Decades in Penglai

A British fund manager. A castle on a hill. Tempranillo, Marselan, and an English-language memoir that became required reading. Twenty years of betting on Penglai before anyone else.

By Tianqi · May 11, 2026 · 6 min read

A British Man on a Hill

In 2004, Chris Ruffle bought a hill outside Penglai.

He was a British fund manager. Beijing in the 1980s, then Taiwan, then Hong Kong, then Shanghai. He ran Atlantis Investment Management, focused on Chinese equities, with billions of assets under management at peak. Wine was the hobby that ate his life. He had previously consulted at Grace Vineyard with Gerard Colin (the same Gerard Colin we met at Long Dai). Then he wanted his own estate.

The hill near Mulang Village in Penglai was 80 hectares. He planted vines on the south slope, built a castle on top, and named the project Treaty Port Vineyards. The castle was a deliberate joke. The Treaty Ports of nineteenth-century China were the European trading enclaves forced open by the Opium Wars; Penglai was never one of them, but the name pinned the whole project to a complicated history. Chris Ruffle was not pretending. He was naming what he was doing.

Treaty Port released its first wine in 2009. By 2015, Chris had published a book, A Decent Bottle of Wine in China, that became the foundational Anglophone text on contemporary Chinese wine. Half memoir, half industry analysis. Every Chinese wine writer of the last decade has read it.

In 2018, he expanded into a second project nearby: Runaway Cow Ridge (Taonuling Estate, 逃牛岭), a more experimental site with a different planting brief.

The Treaty Port Bet on Tempranillo

Most Chinese estates plant Cabernet Sauvignon as the default. A few add Marselan, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot. Chris Ruffle did something unusual: he planted significant Tempranillo.

Tempranillo is Spain’s flagship red grape (Rioja, Ribera del Duero). It is rare in China. The reasoning was practical, not ideological. Ruffle saw that Penglai’s summers were hotter than the standard Bordeaux comfort zone, and Tempranillo handled heat better than Cabernet did. The Spanish grape gave him aromatic ripeness without the green-leaf risk that Cabernet hit in wetter vintages.

The Treaty Port Tempranillo became the estate’s signature wine. Plummy fruit, dried cherry, leather, vanilla and dill from American oak aging. A style closer to Rioja Reserva than to Bordeaux. It also gave the estate a clear marketing differentiator: the only serious Tempranillo in China.

A second varietal that emerged was Marselan, planted around 2010 and producing consistent quality from about 2015 onward. Treaty Port Marselan: deep purple, blackberry, white pepper, soft tannins. Designed for early drinking, with one or two vintages capable of cellaring.

The estate also makes Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and a port-style fortified red (the Treaty Port Tawny), which leans toward Ruffle’s British origins. The fortified is a curio. The Tempranillo and Marselan are the serious work.

Runaway Cow Ridge

In 2018, Ruffle’s second project took shape at Runaway Cow Ridge. The Chinese name 逃牛岭 (Tao Niu Ling) literally means ridge where the cow ran away. A local legend involving a fugitive cow gave the hill its name. The estate kept it.

The site sits a few kilometers from Treaty Port. Different soil profile, more gravel and quartzite, slightly higher elevation. Ruffle’s intent at Runaway Cow Ridge was experimental: try grapes that had not been planted seriously at Treaty Port. Petit Verdot. Saperavi (the Georgian red grape, almost unknown in China). More Tempranillo. Marselan.

The Runaway Cow wines have a sharper personality than Treaty Port’s. Saperavi (which Ruffle calls the dragon grape, by association with Georgian legend) produces an intense, inky red with raw black fruit, peppery spice, and aggressive tannin in its youth. It is not for everyone. But it answers a question: what does an outsider grape look like in Penglai’s climate?

Lu Yang MS visited Runaway Cow in 2020 and gave the Saperavi a positive review. Wang Shenghan MS has been involved as a consultant since 2022.

The Book That Defined the Field

A Decent Bottle of Wine in China (2015) deserves its own mention.

Ruffle wrote it as a memoir-cum-survey. He starts with his own arrival in Penglai, walks readers through buying the land, planting, building the castle, hiring winemakers (including the doomed first hire), and getting the first wines out. Then he panned outward: visits to Grace Vineyard, Silver Heights, Jia Bei Lan, Helan Qing Xue, He Lan Hong, Ao Yun, and others.

Two things made the book important. First, it was the first long-form English-language journalism by someone inside the industry, with skin in the game. Jim Boyce’s Grape Wall of China blog was older and broader, but it was outsider observation; Ruffle was writing from the inside, with money and time on the line. Second, the writing was wry and self-aware. He admitted mistakes (the first oenologist made wine that “smelled like a Bordeaux wine and tasted like a Beijing summer drain”). He named names. He had opinions.

Anyone wanting to understand Chinese wine before 2015 should read it. Anyone wanting to understand Chinese wine culture (the personalities, the rivalries, the missteps) should read it.

Tasting Notes

Treaty Port Tempranillo 2018. Dried cherry, leather, dill, vanilla, a bright acidity. Medium-plus body. Tannins fine and ripe. A wine that drinks like Rioja Crianza, made in China.

Treaty Port Marselan 2019. Deep purple. Blackberry, mulberry, black pepper, soft tannins. Drink young. ABV 14%. James Suckling 92.

Runaway Cow Ridge Saperavi 2020. Inky black-violet. Raw black plum, smoke, black pepper, ferrous mineral note. Acidity high. Tannins gripping. Needs five years. The most distinctive wine made in Shandong.

Runaway Cow Ridge Marselan 2021. Black cherry, violet, spice. More structured than the Treaty Port Marselan. Tannins firmer. The newer site is showing more depth.

Treaty Port Tawny. Sweet, raisinated, walnut, oxidative caramel. A curiosity rather than a serious wine.

What Ruffle Built

Twenty years in. Treaty Port and Runaway Cow Ridge together cover about 50 hectares of vineyards, with a total production of around 100,000 bottles annually. Small by industry standards. Significant by quality.

What Chris Ruffle built is more than a wine business. The castle hosts visitors. The book documents the field. The Tempranillo planting was a deliberate bet on what works in Penglai’s heat. The Saperavi at Runaway Cow Ridge is the more recent experimental position. None of those outputs was predictable; he made them all anyway.

His most useful contribution to Chinese wine may be the legitimization of the question: what should we plant here? Before him, the default answer was Cabernet Sauvignon, because Bordeaux. After Treaty Port, every serious Chinese estate has had to answer it for themselves. Long Dai chose Marselan. Nine Peaks chose Cabernet Franc. Treaty Port chose Tempranillo and Saperavi. The shape of Chinese wine in the next twenty years will depend on how many estates take the question as seriously as Ruffle did.

He is in his late sixties now. He still writes the occasional blog post. The Penglai wine industry, fragile as it is, would be poorer without him.