Collaboration will help sell NZ wine in China

New Zealand's wine industry must mount a joint effort if it is to crack the Chinese market, an Australian consultant has told wine exporters.

Frank Gibson, an experienced adviser to businesses entering China, told an Auckland workshop that New Zealand wine had enormous prospects.

"This is one of the areas where you really could get some big numbers and where there's huge opportunity in my view."

But it was a market that needed to be educated. Mr Gibson said Chinese consumers only really began drinking wine 10 years ago when its government cracked down on local grain-based spirits.

"As a consequence of that, the domestic grape wine industry has grown steadily from about 200 million litres in 2000 to . . . about a billion litres today."

Locally made wine now commanded 90 per cent of the wine market but it was drunk only on special occasions.

The other 10 per cent was being filled by imported bottled wine, which was drunk by a growing number of sophisticated drinkers and commanded a fifth of the market's value.

However, when young Chinese splashed out on imported wine it was generally French or Australian, because Australia had mounted a big campaign there.

Mr Gibson said there was no reason why New Zealand white wine could not do equally well - the Chinese enjoyed it in blind tastings - but there was a lack of information.

"Nobody has told them that people in New York and London and Tokyo and Paris drink great New Zealand wines . . .

"No-one has told them the New Zealand wine story", he said.

"The big problem the New Zealand wine industry has got is 90 per cent of your wineries produce less than 200,000 litres. So who is going to go there and tell the story . . . and should any one wine company have that responsibility, when telling the category story is just as important as the brand story. So there's a crying out need here for collaboration."

Recently Dave Munro, the boss of Ohau Gravels, a small Horowhenua wine label, criticised New Zealand Trade and Enterprise as having a lack of support for wineries trying to break into China.

But Mr Gibson, a member of NZTE's Beachheads programme, said NZTE had a big team working on a wine strategy and its biggest challenge might be working with such a fragmented industry.

Mr Gibson's said would-be wine and food exporters to China should band together with others of similar size.

"Doing it on your own is very, very tough and anybody with less than a million cases, I think, is going to find it very, very hard."