(FT) - Chinese buyers thirsty for profits and prestige are developing a taste for wineries in California’s Napa Valley.

The early morning fog floats away over the imposing Mount George, revealing Joe Chuang’s rows of Chardonnay vines running across the floor of Napa Valley. Short and neat in a dark corduroy jacket and blue striped shirt, Chuang surveys the vineyard from the balcony of a pale yellow, two-storey house.

Inside, the interiors are decorated with Chinese calligraphy; Chinese characters are written on bottles of his Firefly Vineyards wine. But outside, the 12-acre vineyard is sandwiched between fields (where a Texan cowboy is storing hay) and twee wooden Napa houses with US flags hanging from their porches.

Chuang frequently insists that he only makes wine as a “hobby”, with the profits going to fund education for underprivileged children in China. Yet with 5,000 cases a year to sell from Napa, another vineyard in China 20 times the size of this one, and a new non-profit organisation set up to promote Californian wine in China, it is hard to believe.

“Actually, I was not looking for a property that can grow so much wine. I just wanted a gentleman’s vineyard so I can make a little bit of something,” the 72-year-old owner of energy company Eco Global Solutions says. “If I keep it as a hobby, it is more fun. If I turn it into a business then all the grey hair will come and I will look 80 years old.”

Chuang was one of the first Chinese investors to buy a Napa vineyard when he moved to the Californian wine-growing region eight years ago. Since then, many more have bought properties as they seek to sell wine to China, which consumed 1.94bn bottles in 2014, according to a report from the Wine Academy at the Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University in China’s Shaanxi province.

Some, like Chuang, have lived in the US for decades but maintain strong links with China, others have moved to California to try their hand at winemaking or employ Americans to run their vineyards and produce wine for Chinese tastes.