Part 1: Confessions of a Chinese Wine Consultant(1)
First off, a few qualifiers: I am not Chinese nor am I a consultant to Chinese wineries; although, for better or worse, I have tasted my way through multiple Chinese wines, if only a handful overall from a country that boasts several hundred wineries in Shandong province alone.
Sadly, I’m not a master of Chinese either; and currently grasp only enough of the language to get me into trouble or fool taxi drivers into thinking my linguistic skills extend beyond “Turn Left”, “Turn Right” or “Please go to the end of the street”. These are the phrases most ex-pats here obviously have to learn; and, sadly, what most of us only have time to learn. After the usual practical banter, I typically fall at the first hurdle when it comes to intimate questions about my family, salary and what I’m paying on rent (apartment and office): questions just about every Beijing taxi driver will gladly ask.
So it’s with a sense of caution that I talk about anything Chinese, or indeed Chinese consumer responses to wine, relying as I do on my wife Fongyee’s far more competent language capabilities. Nevertheless, through team-work or otherwise, we have been hugely fortunate in seeing the beginnings of a wine culture evolve in China’s capital and further a field; and are now lucky to have contacts across the entire industry, many of whom are increasingly willing to divulge information as we try to put an overall picture together. Excitement is never far away. Any given week can spring up just about any range of requests and invitations: from opening a wine store in the deeper recesses of Hubei province to tasting the world’s most iconic wines with a Beijing crowd almost entirely new to wine.
Even more startling is that it’s now coming up for two years since we left peripatetic academic jobs in the UK and decided to apply our combined skills as educators, wine lovers and consultants to the Beijing and wider China scene(s). We’d been spoilt, to be honest, learning to blind-taste as graduate students at Cambridge University competing in blind-tasting competitions in the UK and France and being exposed to MWs (Master of Wine) and the cream of the British wine trade, not to mention the huge array of wines the UK itself offers. But we’d also used that time to explore food-and-wine matching possibilities with Chinese cuisine(s) at least from what Chinese ingredients we could source in leafy Cambridge shire.
