In China, taste for wine comes of age
Deep in the cellars of a sprawling industrial complex in China’s northern Hebei province, a row of giant steel vats runs as far as the eye can see. At first glance, they seem to be just another massive manufacturing plant in China’s northern industrial heartland. But the vats in this cellar do not hold chemicals or dyes. Each container holds some 1,000 tonnes of grapes, and this plant in Hebei’s Huailai County is at the heart of China’s wine revolution.
In China, even the business of wine, that most refined of indulgences, is all about quantity. The country now has the world’s fastest growing market for wine, with an estimated 600 million consumers. In 2007, Chinese wine consumption was estimated at a huge 800 million bottles. (India’s annual consumption is around 10 million bottles.)
But till two decades ago, drinkers of grape wine were hard to find in China. How did this wine revolution begin? The Chinese were first exposed to western grape wines only after the country opened up in 1978. China has, for long, been a nation of drinkers, though the pungent rice alcohol has been the poison of choice. But the Chinese instantly took to the western wine, and sensing an opportunity to cultivate a huge market, the government invested some 2 billion yuan (Rs. 1,400 crore) in setting up the first home-grown wine company -- the rather unimaginatively named Great Wall wine company.
“When we started out in 1983, we had an operation with 200 people,” says Xi Dezhi, a manager at Great Wall. “Now, in all our estates we employ 1,00,000 people.”
On its sprawling Hebei estate, some 50,000 tonnes of grapes are processed every year, and its bottles go out to every province in China and 20 countries overseas as the face of China’s nascent wine industry. The domestic wine market has doubled in the last seven years, and in terms of total acreage of vineyards, China now trails only France, Spain and Italy.
But for China’s wine industry, the focus so far has been on quantity, not quality. Low and mid-level wines like Great Wall dominate the market. Consequently, Chinese wines have struggled to make an impression overseas.
“The consumption in China is growing very fast,” says Shanghai-based wine critic Aubrey Buckingham. “But the wines are not yet highly regarded outside of China. That’s only now slowly beginning to change.”
Chinese producers are perceived to lack the technical expertise of older European wine houses. But in the last couple of years, with greater exposure to international wines and a growing aspirational class, tastes and demands are changing.
The import of high-end European wines has been steadily rising in the affluent southern cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou. Now, more high-end boutique wines, set up as collaborations with European houses, have begun to emerge such as Grace Vineyards in Shanxi, which was set up by Spain’s well-known Torres wine house.