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Uncorking China
Winemakers around the world believe that a potentially huge wine market may
be fermenting in China. Now if only the Chinese would give up their juice.
By Joseph Guinto
Illustration by Red Nose Studio
Numbers and alcohol don’t mix.
Take this statistic, for instance: Per capita, Americans consume 2,670 percent more wine annually than the Chinese do. Based on that, you’d figure that a lot of Americans would soon be joining the parade of Hollywood starlets who are heading to rehab. But you’d be wrong. In fact, the vast numerical difference between wine consumption in the United States and in China actually says less about Americans and more about Chinese preferences for adult beverages.
You see, per capita, Americans drink 2.77 gallons of wine per year. That would be a lot — too much — if you were to down it all at once. But drinking 2.77 gallons, or about 10 bottles of wine, over the course of a year is equivalent to having less than a glass a day. And a glass a day is supposed to be good for you. The Chinese, meanwhile, drink just one-tenth of a gallon of wine per year per capita. That’s about half a typical 750- milliliter bottle. In other words, Americans aren’t wine lushes, and the Chinese, who have long preferred beer and distilled spirits, don’t drink that much wine.
 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.”
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.
Ice and juice. The juice is mostly for mixing with white wines. Red wines are often combined with lemon-lime soda. Blech.
“The biggest challenge in expanding the market for wine in China is that the consumers’ overall understanding of wine is still very limited,” says Don St. Pierre Jr., managing partner of ASC Fine Wines, one of the biggest wine importers and distributors in China.
Then again, St. Pierre points out that even those Chinese consumers who aren’t buying wine are aware that it can be a finely crafted beverage. “That perception of wine is actually a big plus,” he says, “because Chinese consumers perceive it as socially and culturally sophisticated, as more healthy than other alcoholic beverages, and in the case of red wine, as lucky because of the color. But the challenge is moving the consumer from this positive perception to a greater overall understanding of wine so the consumer is more comfortable and open to making wine part of their lifestyle.”
The Chinese government is helping this cause considerably. It started promoting the perceived health benefits of drinking wine 20 years ago. Ten years ago, the government started serving wine at state functions for the first time. Fu says that it’s having an impact. “Traditionally, Chinese people make friends and relationships by drinking together,” he says. “Nobody used to care about health during drinking, but in recent years, that concept has changed. More and more Chinese people care about health, so they have changed to drinking red wines.”
Those red wines, when they aren’t semi-local bulk wines, are primarily French or Australian imports. American wines represent only a tiny portion of the market. But even that small slice is an improvement. At the beginning of the last decade, American wines were just a phantom in China. Today, at Cecconi’s Italian on Saint Mark’s Square in the Venetian Macao Resort Hotel, you can order a swell bottle of the sought-after California cult wine Opus One.
REMEMBER, THOUGH, that numbers and alcohol don’t mix. If all you knew was that Chinese buyers were ponying up big money for top wines and that other Chinese consumers, like Fu, were behind a market that’s growing by 13 percent or more per year, you’d figure that it wouldn’t be long before people throughout China would be sitting at their dinner tables, swirling, sniffing, sipping, and savoring wines from all over the world. But there’s a long way to go and a lot of very elemental work that must be done before that happens. “Chinese consumers regularly purchase wine as gifts and buy wine when they are entertaining important customers or officials in restaurants,” says ASC’s St. Pierre. “But they are not necessarily buying a bottle of wine for dinner at home with family. At the moment, that is the major cultural challenge we face.”
Not to be deterred, ASC, whose sales are already growing by more than 50 percent a year, employs six full-time wine educators among its 400-person workforce. The educators fan out across China and train everyone about wine — from individuals who are considering changing their home drinking habits to restaurant waiters who need to learn how to use a corkscrew, a device they may not have seen before.
The funny thing about that is, while the rest of the wine world starts moving toward adopting modern enclosures like screw caps, the Chinese actually prefer corks. That’s good news for winemakers.
Patrick Hughes, a Seattle resident who’s worked for Montrose, another importerdistributor in China, says he discovered that even Chinese consumers who weren’t initially sold on wine for its taste seemed to enjoy it for its ceremony. Hughes worked last year at Montrose’s flagship retail wineshop, in Beijing, which was laid out not by country and appellation, as are most U.S. wine stores, but by occasion — with birthday wines in one aisle, business wines in another, romantic-occasion wines in another, and so on. He says he saw plenty of “wrinkled-up watched very intently and inquisitively. She asked if she could give the corkscrew a whirl and open a bottle herself. She struggled initially, but then pulled out the cork. She was so happy to pour her first glass from a bottle she had opened all by herself.” noses and puckered lips” after Chinese customers took their first-ever sips of wine but that he also noticed that “the intricacies of all that goes with the world of wine seemed to be very appealing to the Chinese.”
Like, for instance, that cork thing. “One of my favorite memories is of opening a bottle of Francis Ford Coppola Zinfandel,” Hughes says. watched very intently and inquisitively. She asked if she could give the corkscrew a whirl and open a bottle herself. She struggled initially, but then pulled out the cork. She was so happy to pour her first glass from a bottle she had opened all by herself.”
JOSEPH GUINTO, a frequent contributor to American Way , has purchased ice wines in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, but never in Washington D.C.’s Chinatown.
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