Terroir

解百纳 (jiebaina) is not a grape variety. It is a Changyu trademark, and the eight-year fight over it was China's best-known wine trademark case. Great Wall was among the companies that petitioned to cancel the mark, arguing it was simply the generic Chinese name for the Cabernet family. They did not win it away. A settlement in January 2011 left the trademark with Changyu and granted six companies, COFCO Great Wall's among them, royalty-free and open-ended licence to keep using it. The word on this front label is a competitor's brand, used by permission.

What the word does not do is fix a composition. Changyu traces the name to 1931 and to a wine built mainly on Cabernet Gernischt; the challengers read it as a transliteration of "Cabernet" covering Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Gernischt together. Neither reading is a variety declaration, the term has no entry in China's national grape register, and this bottle declares no variety of its own.

天赋葡园 (tianfu putaoyuan), rendered Terroir in Latin script, is Great Wall's multi-region series rather than a single site. The declared origin here is Yantai in Shandong, and the wine was made by COFCO Great Wall Wine (Penglai) on the Shandong coast. Dry under GB/T 15037, the national standard that fixes China's sugar, acidity and sulfur limits, with grapes and potassium metabisulfite the only declared ingredients.