Fu Hongbing, though, is an exception to that rule. He's an
executive in
Shanghai working with Cooper Industries, a diversified
Houston-based manufacturing company with facilities in
China. Fu,
like a growing number of middle- and upper-class Chinese, has
developed an appreciation for tasty wine. He drinks "foreign
wines," he says, especially "French wines, German wines, and
Canadian ice wines."
Canadian ice wine? Canadian ice wine isn't even that easy to find
in U.S. retail stores and restaurants. Plus, it's an expensive
product. To make it, the grapes are picked immediately after the
year's first frost, and, as such, 375-milliliter bottles of ice
wine can fetch more than $60 in a wineshop. So how does Fu get his
hands on the stuff? Well, that's the big surprise behind those per
capita numbers. China as a whole is not yet a big market for wine,
but thanks to importers catering to the newfound good tastes of the
few by stocking big-city retail stores and high-end restaurants
with fine wines, hundreds of thousands of Chinese are becoming
consumers of some of the best wines in the world. And this new
consumer interest, in combination with the government's backing of
wine's health benefits, may spur the entire nation to follow suit.
"A rising upper middle class is embracing wine as they embrace all
Western consumer items," says Stephen Reiss, an author, a blogger,
and a certified wine educator (yes, certified) based in Aspen,
Colorado. Reiss, who was a member of an influential 1996 U.S. wine
delegation to China, says this upper middle class is driving the
development of the wine market - albeit in an awkward way. "Many
Chinese people are willing to buy expensive wines, but many have no
appreciation for what they are buying. Right now, they are mostly
label drinkers, trying to score a taste of any well-known wine so
they can check it off their list."