Sporting a cap with a red star on it, French veteran winemaker Bruno Paumard is among the most eye-catching individuals in Wuhai－one of the few Caucasians living in the small northern Chinese city.

Since 2010, the 51-year-old has worked at Chateau Hansen in Wuhai, in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, which he calls "paradise for grapes" because of its terrain, annual sunshine hours, and its warm days and cool nights.

Paumard hails from Angers in France's Loire Valley, a globally celebrated hub for top-level wine. Encouraged by his father, he earned a diploma in vineyard management at age 15 and later became a sommelier.

Paumard later went around Europe to look for opportunities and was a finalist in the Best Sommelier of the United Kingdom competition in 1989. Returning to his hometown in 1991, he taught wine tasting in a local school and became a winemaker.

He also was one of few experts setting prices for wine auctions in France, and he started writing books about wine tasting. One of his three published titles sold about 100,000 copies.

Paumard's romance with Chinese culture started long ago, as a childhood fan of kung fu star Bruce Lee. When he was 16, Paumard established a music band named after Genghis Khan.

Paumard didn't expect that his first visit to China, in 2005, would make him immediately decide to settle down here.

"It is all for love. You know, I am French," he says.

At the time divorced for two years, Paumard was looking for a new family. When he visited Beijing to promote wines at Year of France in China events, Paumard, who confesses that he was then unable to clearly distinguish among Asian faces, was surprised to find that many Chinese girls looked like his idol－Chinese film star Zhang Ziyi.

He then encountered a Chinese woman he found to be much like Zhang and decided she was the one he was looking for. Soon he quit his job in France to be a wine distributor in Beijing, and he married her two years later.

In 2010, Paumard made a visit to Hansen when he toured Chinese vineyards for his book about wine. While his Beijing business was doing well, Paumard soon accepted the owner's invitation to work there.

"I believed it was a good challenge for me to improve the image of Chinese wines," he recalls. He has helped the vineyard developed many new products, which he proudly calls "my babies".

Paumard says working in China has changed him in a good way－"I am more patient than before"－and he's impressed by the kindness around him.

"People here are so nice to me, which makes me feel like being on another planet compared to when I'm in France," he says. He's mutually cordial and greets every worker at the winery in simple Chinese.

However, there is often a clash of ideas about winemaking, he says.

For example, like many domestic winemakers, Hansen's Chinese technicians wanted to filter wine for sediment-free quality to better accommodate Chinese customers' tastes. For Paumard and French conventions, that is over-processing－h(huán)e'd rather leave some sediment, which also preserves flavor. The two sides finally agreed that no sediment will appear within the first year after the wine is bottled, which is the minimum period permitted according to China's national standard.

"I am glad they let me have the final say in most cases," Paumard says, laughing.

Paumard has also pushed to take Hansen products abroad, showing the wines at many international wine events.

"Today, our region is on the global map of vineyards, and our brand is known in the world," says Paumard. "That's a good beginning."

At Paumard's suggestion, a small museum about winemaking has been built at Hansen.

To collect exhibits such as old articles used in traditional winemaking in France, Paumard bought a lot of winemaking tools from his friends at home.

"I feel like I am sort of a preacher of wine culture," he says.

Paumard says many Chinese winemakers lack experience in the vineyards and focus on the winery science.

"To be a good winemaker, you must observe everything, not just numbers."

Life in a small city like Wuhai can be slow, but Paumard has learned to cope.

He calls himself an "addict" of the WeChat mobile app. Besides adding many new friends he meets, he often searches on the Internet for people who can speak English. Spending lots of free time on WeChat, he sees the platform as a powerful medium to build up a good image for his products, as well as for himself.

Sharing his activities about wines "is like a book of memories", Paumard jokes.

It's been a good tool for his work, too: He has opened an online shop using the WeChat app to sell Hansen wine products.

He has traveled around China, and he jokes that he'd like to own a house with a garden and live a quiet life in Dali, Yunnan province, after his retirement, because he loves the natural environment and weather there so much.

Now, Paumard regularly travels between Wuhai and Shenzhen for the vineyard's product branding, and he's just finished a book that he spent nine years writing. In Winemaker, he aims to teach people how to make wine at home. It has been translated into Chinese and will be published soon.