Donald St. Pierre: wine’s gateway to China?

Donald St. Pierre, an American and a prominent importer of wine to China, receives an extensive profile in the current issue of the New Yorker (the food issue). He arrived in the country in 1985 thanks to a position with American Jeep and in 1996 he started importing wines after forays into other things such as scrap metal, lingerie, and Chinese and Russian ammunition. Here’s a taste of the early days:

When the St. Pierres began importing wine, after buying a Hong Kong shelf company called Asia Solutions Corporation, the also created a product of their own. The family was Canadian by birth, but St. Pierre figured, “God damn, let’s use our French name.” Chateau St. Pierre was California bulk red wine, bottled at a factory in Beijing. It bore a label with the stencilled image of a chateau, which the importers had copied from a coffee-table book. No bottle cost more than forty-five yuan–less than six dollars at the time.

At the beginning they also had a fantastically successful promotion selling two bottles of wine and tie gift boxes. Now they also import Gaja, Penfold’s Grange, and Guigal among many others.

The story provides a small window into wine consumption in China too. Red wine has been called “red liquor” if only to distinguish it from baiju, a “ferocious grain alcohol.” But in the 1990s, the authorities wanted to divert grain back to food production, the story reports, and upgrade the quality of domestic wine. Baiju was banned at ministerial banquets and wine import duties were lowered. But in this video on the newyorker.com, Donald St. Pierre, Jr. says culture of alcohol consumption write large often takes that the ultimate sign of respect for a guest is to down the drink in a single gulp, a tradition known locally as “ganbei.” And apparently for decades, Chinese wine was made in “enormous, state-run industrial wineries [that] blended grapes with chemicals and coloring.” Hmm, doesn’t sound like something worth sipping.

The picture to the right is of Don Sr via Grape Wall of China, an English-language site about the wine scene in China. (Update: Jim Boyce of Grape Wall posts some useful insights in the comments section)