(WSJ) - ON A RARE CLEAR DAY, Grace Vineyard, 310 miles southwest of Beijing, might be mistaken for a winery in Tuscany. The balcony of the Italianate mansion overlooks lush rows of grapevines stretching to the horizon, where low mountains hover in the haze. Picnic tables sit scattered in a garden beneath slender trees that rustle in the dry wind. But take a stroll outside the winery gates, and you instantly step into the heart of provincial China. The unpaved lanes lead to farming villages whose crumbling facades are daubed with old Communist Party slogans and hung with tattered red flags. The motorbikes rattling past are beaten-up relics from Mao’s day; the grape pickers moving through the fields wear traditional broad peasant hats. Beyond them sit the half-forgotten byways of Shanxi province, a region renowned in the Imperial era as a center of trade and banking but more notorious in recent decades for its polluted cities devoted to the coal industry. Only a short drive away lie remnants of China’s ancient glory, such as the enormous Chang Family Manor, once the luxurious abode of tea merchants, its interior lined with exquisitely carved wood.

Grace Vineyard is focused more on China’s future. In the elegant dining room adorned with contemporary artwork, a small army of servers glides around me. While the kitchen prepares a banquet of delectable Shanxi treats, including scissor-cut noodles, sautéed river fish and fried bing pastries, a fastidious wine steward creeps up at regular intervals to refill my glass with Grace’s flagship Cabernet blend, the rich and velvety 2008 Chairman’s Reserve, rated 85 by Robert Parker’s website for its subtle blackberry flavors and hints of bay leaf, pepper and cedar.

Grace is at the forefront of one of China’s more improbable trends, as the most successful of a new wave of boutique wineries. Most have cropped up in the dry terrain of Ningxia in the north. But winemakers are also venturing into China’s more varied landscapes, laying vines from the deserts of the old Silk Road to the foothills of the Himalayas. There are now around 400 wineries in the country. Wine consultants from France, Greece, California and Australia are becoming as common as foreign IT experts in Shanghai, and the local product is being marketed not only to expats but to an increasingly sophisticated Chinese clientele.

The results are beginning to startle critics. In 2011, the Cabernet blend Jia Bei Lan, from the Helan Quingxue vineyard, became the first Chinese wine to take the prestigious international trophy at the Decanter World Wine Awards (judges praised its “supple, graceful and ripe”