Though surely there are many legitimate aficionados among the estimated 300,000 regular wine drinkers in China, Reiss's point is well taken. Plenty of Chinese wine fans do seem to be label hunting, stalking the most famous names and vintages - out of Bordeaux, especially. It's not surprising, then, that Chinese buyers have recently become prominent on the auction market, where the world's finest wines are bought and sold. When the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, auctioned nearly 5,000 bottles of wine last year, a bottle of 1989 Château Petrus, a top- flight Bordeaux, which had been purchased for Paris's city-hall functions during Jacques Chirac's tenure as mayor of that city, sold for more than $5,000. The losing bidder was the Antique Wine Company in London, one of the major players in the auction market. The winner was Liu Fei Fei, a relatively unknown wine merchant from Beijing.

Still, the losing bidder isn't holding a grudge. An Antique Wine Company official told the International Herald Tribune that in the past few years, he's sold more highend wines, including from Château Petrus, to clients in gambling-rich Macao alone than to clients in any other single country.

ALL THIS IS not to say that only fancy wines are in demand in China. Less expensive, made-in-China wines are also on the market. Reiss says most of those wines are of very low quality. Sourced largely from imported bulk wines, they have lots of added sugar, which is supposed to mask flawed tastes. If you look hard enough, you might even find a bottle of this kind of wine in the United States. I picked up one for $5 in Chinatown in Washington, D.C., and it was undrinkable - to put it nicely.

The Chinese have a solution to this quality issue, though. "If you drink wine in bars or in karaoke places, you usually mix it up with ice and juice," Fu says.