Confessions of a Chinese Wine Consultant (Part 2)

    Last month I began Confessions of a Chinese Wine Consultant: what I hope will be a series of posts devoted to the realities of working with wine here in China; especially in Beijing, but also on the back of repeat trips to Shanghai, some frolicks in a few other ‘first’ and ‘second’-tier cities, with the promise of odd reports (I mean ‘odd’ as in occasional) from some remoter locales and various vineyard sites.
 
    But having bemoaned Beijing’s winter-time aridity last time round – and wondering about the logistics of selling/distributing wine under sometimes adverse conditions, dryness included – I’d like to rewind a little. Why Beijing? Why did Fongyee and I hit upon China’s capital – ‘central’ and politically powerful though it is – when the real wine hubbub must surely be flowing in Shanghai, one of the country’s most significant ports and where over 70% of China’s alcoholic drinks imports are thought to enter the PRC?
 
    Shanghai does have the most sophisticated and extensive wine market, to be sure. But our propulsion to Beijing grew out of a number of push and pull factors (I never knew the drive for wine could be so ‘physical’…):

    1. The very fact China’s capital was thought to be more than a ‘little behind’ Shanghai suggested opportunities for furthering wine education/training programmes;

    2. As the political centre and focus of the Olympics, Beijing would obviously be a significant place to begin, not least owing to the different groups of wine lovers emerging there (politicos, heads of national organizations, artists, national media, even the large student population soon to be China’s future);

    3. The city itself is a construction site which, for better or worse, heralds a new age (as I write someone has just started what can only be described as flatulent drilling two floors up… At night Beijing is lit up, beyond the neon, with welders’ sparks). Although Shanghai is no different in this respect, the obsession with opening multiple five-star – and some six-star – hotels was bound to affect the Beijing wine market;

    4. Beijing offers much less of an ex-pat dominated wine scene/trade, providing more opportunities to see how Chinese tasters react to new wines;

    5. Beijingers have a traditional regard for education/learning (this is not a comment intended to denigrate the Shanghainese….);

    6. Beijing has better food! (I’m sorry, but the city does offer the cuisines of every single Chinese province as well as international fare from around the world);

    7. Fongyee already knew the place and

    8. The buildings are actually heated in winter (not a luxury Shanghai enjoys).
 
    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.
   
    Fast forward to December 2008: there is now more retail here, albeit on a limited scale; and wine clubs of various sizes are sprouting for Beijing’s wealthy (focus Bordeaux). Wine lists are becoming more exciting too with less evidence of wayward persuasion by strong-arm importers. Mercifully, tasting opportunities are more frequent and more inviting with new importers coming on the scene (The Wine Republic) – some of whom have done well elsewhere in China or in Hong Kong/Macau (Watson’s, Links Concept). At the same time some of the more distinctive Shanghai importers (like Ruby Red Fine Wines and Globus Fine Wines) are sending their wines to Beijing and the traditional players here (Aussino, ASC, Torres China, Summergate) are shaking up their lists to rival relative newcomers like East Meets West. And so it goes on…. The point is the market is becoming more dynamic.

    My earliest memories are all based on shocks, of one sort or another: not culture shocks, so much as, what, ‘vinous bafflement’? I remember being in a well-known Sichuan restaurant chain and seeing a young Chinese couple confidently order a bottle of Argentinean Malbec. This was great! The waiter came back, presented the bottle elegantly, cut the cap and removed the cork without trouble. He then left; so I expected the happy diners would just serve themselves (this was not exactly a white linen affair after all). Nothing happened… for some time. The waiter then returned with an ice bucket and, with some ceremony, coaxed the bottle into ice-water. Thankfully, the food then arrived, so the young Chinese couple out on a date were saved the embarrassment – if embarrassment it was – of broaching when to serve their rapidly chilling Malbec (not a grape known for being short on tannin).
 
    Now I have nothing against chilling certain reds – and the point of this anecdote is not to poke fun at people coming to wine for the first time. It’s just that so much affects how we experience wine whether in terms of cultural expectations (replete with aspirations and blind-spots), not to mention the condition in which wine is sent to China, stored and served here (transport, distribution and storage temperatures always constituting big worries). Our first concern as educators was, therefore, to gauge what an appropriate starting point should be. Clearly, for many, it was best to start with the very basics of the very basics; just as most foreigners would be hard pushed to get to grips with China’s intricate tea culture and myriad cuisines. Then, there was the all-encompassing issue of language, especially for Fongyee who was already familiar with the multiple translations proliferating for the same grape varieties, same wineries, same wine-making processes; and thereby having to battle with the misconceived notions some of these translations inevitably foster.
 
    We had to be careful in other respects too. No doubt the extent of our wine knowledge and tasting experience – not remarkable by UK standards, but intimidating to some people in what is a new trade here – primed us for the odd encounter or two (‘odd’ in all senses), even with the best will in the world. Local Chinese were very willing to learn, but some of the ex-pat community probably wondered who we (wine upstarts) were! No doubt some still do.
 
    Still, we were told some pretty strange and frankly erroneous things by those who claimed to have a handle on wine (always a bad sign): that Port is not alcoholic, that the only way to taste wine is to swallow it, that all rosé wines are a blend of white and red (and so on and so forth….). Of course, no one can reasonably get annoyed at general misunderstanding or getting the wrong end of the stick, at least on this level; but there was a danger that new Chinese wine lovers were being peddled garbage dressed as ‘wine education’ by locals and foreigners alike. At the same time, we were lucky to meet people who combined knowledge with experience of the market, even if these were in short supply (the people and the knowledge). 
 
    One importer, showing off his ‘intimate’ knowledge of Burgundy, declared to me at what was an awkwardly empty tasting to begin with: ‘Oh, yes, we’re very pleased. We’ve just got in some Moux’. I strained, silently toying over the word: ‘Moux? Er, producer? Vineyard? Village? None of above?...’ ‘It’s a Grand Cru’ I was informed in a breezy, matter-of-fact tone, as if I should have known this given I was a wine educator. Some very long seconds passed. Eventually, the penny dropping, I blurted: ‘Oh, yes, Clos des Mouches, right, yeah, near Beaune, yeah’, stupidly adding: ‘it’s not a Grand Cru’. Stony silence.
 
    I hadn’t intended to play teacher and know there is always more to learn about wine (especially Burgundy). But by this stage, even after a few months in Beijing, I’d just got sick of people trotting out ‘Oh, it’s a Grand Cru’ for just about every French wine under the sun; even those, therefore, that have no ‘Grand Cru’ appellation system.
 
    It was time to go back to school (and, for me, take an extra course in diplomacy).