“I bet you think we’re crazy,” said Jean-Guillaume Prats ruefully. The CEO in charge of LVMH’s project to make the best wine in China was looking at the rudimentary building site – many a hairpin bend above the Mekong River and four hours’ white-knuckle drive from the nearest airport – that will be Mo?t Hennessy’s winery and guest lodge. Tibetan women were working with pulleys and wheelbarrows. The electricity supply was far from reliable. We were at an altitude about 20 times higher than the highest vineyard in Bordeaux. Prats then resumed his interrogation of Stephen Deng, the estate director, as to whether the buildings could really be ready in time for the scheduled opening in September.

If they are not, it is Deng who stands to lose most face. While Bordelais Maxence Dulou is in charge of the vines and wines, Deng has to keep local government and other relevant bodies, all 23 of them, happy. On the day of our visit he was suddenly called away to meet a representative of one of them to reassure him that the project would indeed bring great prestige to this remote corner of the Himalayan foothills in Deqin county in Diqing prefecture, at the western limit of the province of Yunnan, 35km from Tibet’s border.

The story begins with a conundrum. China has a burgeoning future as a wine producer and consumer but all Chinese wine regions have one major disadvantage. They are either, like Shandong on the east coast, so wet in summer that it is a struggle to harvest fully ripe, healthy grapes – or they are so cold in winter, like Ningxia, where Mo?t Hennessy recently established a sparkling wine operation, that the vines have to be laboriously buried every autumn to protect them from freezing to death. Quite apart from the damage it can do to vines, the continuing urbanisation of China suggests that eventually this may become rather expensive. It was the fact that Yunnan is free of both these disadvantages that led me to ask Mo?t if I could come and see for myself.