Part 2: Confessions of a Chinese Wine Consultant(2)
But I don’t want to add grape spirit to the fire that is Beijing v. Shanghai; and hope rather to conjure up a few memories of the Beijing wine scene back in early 2007. If this sounds not all that long ago, it should be said that things really do happen very quickly in China; and, even if the overall size of the market for imported bottled wine remains small by international standards, that market is almost doubling in size every year. (What the global economic situation will do, of course, remains to be seen… but we haven’t witnessed a noticeable decrease in at least fine wine consumption here).
In early 2007 the selection of wines in Beijing’s supermarkets was pretty dire and there was next to no wine retail (retail chains are much more of a phenomenon in southern China). Some wine stores popped up, often with slightly baffling stock; and a more serious chain, Top Cellar, began to develop (although they became swamped by offering free wine tastings). For those interested in imported wine, purchasing and consuming at on-trade locations or buying directly from importers were the only ways to go. You might think that Chinese restaurants would be beset by some odd ideas as to how to organize a list, but many start-up ‘Western’ restaurants (and more established names) didn’t exactly wow wine lovers either. Even allowing for Beijing not being London or New York, you had to wonder at the ruthlessly ‘Wild East’ atmosphere, with such practises as restaurants being ‘incentivized’ into getting all of their wine from only one importer and thereby essentially locking out any real freedom of choice for the consumer.
