China wine news: Ma Huiqin joins Ningxia wine bureau

Professor Ma Huiqin has assumed a formal position with the bureau in Ningxia, China’s most promising region, after years of providing unofficial help. Ma’s title is assistant to the director of the Ningxia Bureau of Grape Industry Development. The director is Li Xueming.

Ma has assisted the Ningxia trade in areas as diverse as vineyard management, wine tourism, event organization and wine marketing, and helped coordinate both the region’s entry into the International Organization of Vine and Wine (OIV) in 2012 and its subsequent participation in OIV events in China and abroad. Ningxia, which has a population of 6.6 million, has seen its wine industry grow both in terms of quality and quantity during the past decade and now has 40,000 hectares of vineyards.

Ma will split her time between Yinchuan, the capital of Ningxia, and Beijing, where she will continue to carry a full teaching load at China Agricultural University (CAU). Her specialties are molecular biology and wine marketing. (As a result, she has contributed to markedly divergent research papers, from “Chinese Choices: A Survey of Wine Consumers in Beijing”, which is easy for the average person to grasp, to “Proteomic Changes in Grape Embryogenic Callus in Response to Agrobacterium Tumefaciens Mediated Transformation”, which gave me a migraine by the third paragraph.) Ma has also taught wine appreciation to more than 5,000 students over the past fifteen years.

Ma received her PhD from China Agricultural University. She studied in Israel, South Africa and The United States and has worked on wine projects with experts in Australia, Portugal, Chile and elsewhere as well as in China’s wine regions.

She has also been a supporter of the Grape Wall of China blog since day one.

Note: Ma provided support for several Ningxia projects in which I was involved, including the Ningxia Winemakers Challenge that brought seven winemakers to China in 2012, and Ningxia wine tastings in Yinchuan, Beijing and Nanjing.

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