Sino relations on red alert
Selling Australian wine to China means staying ahead of the competition, writes Jeni Port.
CHINA is an exciting, emerging market for the Australian wine industry. But there are 1.3 billion people in China, and with a per capita wine consumption of half a litre each, many wine-making nations want a piece of the action.
Our ambitions for success now rest on the shoulders of a young woman about to become Wine Australia's Market Development Officer based in Shanghai.
Summer Yan was born in 1979 in Jiaxing, almost sacred as the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921. She has plenty of advice for Australian winemakers spending time and money to enter the market, too.
Her most recent trip to Australia, her third, was to soak up Aussie wines and lend some insight into her homeland.
China was introduced to the wines of France nearly two decades ago, and in particular the wines of Bordeaux. Little wonder, then, that there is a preference for red wine and in particular, cabernet sauvignon blends.
"Eighty per cent of wine is sold in supermarkets and 80% is red," says Yan. "Cabernet blended with merlot is better than a single-variety cabernet. That's not attractive."
That's a handy piece of information to keep in mind, especially given that Australia produces a fair amount of cabernet and is desperately looking for enthusiastic export markets. Encouragingly, Yan says merlot and shiraz sales in Chinaare on the up and up.
Forget about sending heaps of our bulk wine to China. There's no market there, or at least no market that we will make money out of.
Forget about trying to introduce lots of cheap, sunshiney, fruity wines (aka, dregs from an oversupply of fruit from recent vintages). Those kind of wines can't compete with China's own domestic wine industry that churns out really cheap (but rarely cheerful) wines.
And those cute-as-a-button koalas and kangaroos on labels don't impress. They're so 20th century.
"If you put a koala on the label, although this is very Australia, this is not high-end," says Yan. "Chinese like simple, classic, elegant labels." The "high-end" French wines, it seems, have already had a big influence on the market.
A market insight report prepared on China by the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation notes that wine drinking in China is now "aspirational" with many consumers buying wines for reasons of prestige rather than taste. "Reflecting this, the majority of wine sold in China is given as gifts," it says.
This is where expensive bordeaux, champagne and cognac come into their own.
France is the number one exporter of wines to China.
Australia is number two, but Spain and Italy are breathing heavy on our collar.
Yan represents the younger generation of Chinese for whom wine won't be so much aspirational, as natural. Her story is similar to that of many her age who have been exposed to Western cultures in recent years.
From 2001 to 2006, she worked for an Australian architect based in Shanghai who introduced her to Aussie wines, mainly Penfolds and Wyndham Estate. Clearly, the guy was an enthusiast.
Something clicked.
By mid-2006, she had joined Austrade as a business development manager on the food and beverage team. "Lucky me," she says. On August 18 this year she joined Wine Australia, "the big family".
Her tastes in wine are the tastes of other young people in China. She loves white wines, sparklings and rose{aac}. She expects sales of these wines to increase because young Chinese are entertaining more, going out more for drinks and want "lively" and "relaxing" styles of wines.
The wine of the moment in China (apart from those reds, of course) is moscato.
Brown Brothers' biggest seller in Asia is its sweet and fruity zibibbo (the word zibibbo is an accepted synonym for the muscat or moscato grape). Another Victorian winemaker, Terra Felix, has just sent off the entire 15,000-litre production of its moscato gold to China.
Apparently, gold is the colour of good luck and figures prominently on the Terra Felix bottles - not a koala or wombat in sight.